The Kaya Tree of Shiraki Kojin Shrine

A go board cut from a single block of this species can cost more than a car. Kaya is the wood every serious go and shogi player wants, pale gold, faintly resinous, very slightly springy under the stone, and it is expensive for the reason that matters here: Torreya nucifera grows extremely slowly, so a board-grade trunk represents centuries rather than decades. Japan has been cutting the good ones out of its forests for four hundred years. This one is 3.24 metres round and it is still standing, on the grounds of Shiraki Kojin Shrine in the hills of Asakita-ku, which is where the big ones tend to be left. The Environment Ministry's surveyors measured it in the year 2000 and marked its health as partly withered: dieback in the crown, a living tree underneath it. The rest is blank. Two searches for this shrine by name returned the district's own hiking and sightseeing pages and nothing whatever about the site, so no age has ever been published and nobody has checked on the tree since that survey. Shiraki is walking country below its own mountain, and the shrine sits at Odera. If you pass it, look up and tell us what state the crown is in. On a tree recorded with dieback twenty six years ago, that is the one thing worth knowing and the one thing we do not have.