The Daimyo Oak of Omori Hachiman Shrine

A daimyo oak this size is unusual enough to be the whole point. Quercus dentata is a slow, often stunted tree of poor ground and cold slopes, and it rarely puts on real bulk. The Environment Ministry's surveyors measured this one at 3.30 metres round in 1988, in good health, at a small Hachiman shrine in the mountains of Yuki-cho, and gave it the same age band as the great cedar standing with it: over three hundred years. Its leaves are the reason most people in Japan know this species without knowing they do. Kashiwa is the oak whose broad leaves wrap the rice cakes eaten at Children's Day, chosen because the old leaves stay on the branch all winter and let go only when the new buds push them off, which was read as a family line that does not break. On a tree of this age the effect runs for months. Brown leaves hanging into spring, on a crown that has not looked bare since the last time somebody was watching. The shrine sits at Fushidani, two minutes from the Omori bus stop, about fifty minutes out of central Hiroshima. Beyond the register, no source names this oak at all, so the three hundred years is as close to an age as anyone has published. If you know better, we would like to be corrected.