The Hackberry of Ato Kojin Shrine

As far as we can establish, one document in the world records this tree. The Environment Ministry's national survey of giant trees sent somebody to Ato Kojin Shrine in the year 2000 to measure a Chinese hackberry at 3.80 metres round and note that it was in good health. Two searches for anything else at all about this shrine came back with nothing. That is not unusual for a Kojin shrine. They are the small ones, the local ones, dedicated to the rough deity of the hearth and the fire, and there are a great many of them in this part of Japan. They tend to sit at the edge of a hamlet with a few big trees and no visitors, which is precisely the arrangement that produces a hackberry of this size. Celtis sinensis is a workhorse of a tree: fast, tolerant, hard to kill, planted at road junctions and field corners all over the country, with small dark fruit in autumn that the birds take. Getting to nearly four metres round means it has been left alone for a very long time by people who had no particular reason to leave it. How long, we cannot tell you. There is no age on the record and no second document to check one against. If you live in Kunikusa and know this tree, that is a gap you could close for us.