The Machilus Tree of Nokanmuri Shrine

Five metres and twenty eight centimetres round, at a shrine in a hamlet too small to place reliably on a map. Nokanmuri sits in Asa-cho, in the far north of Hiroshima's Asakita ward, inside the wider Kuji area, and the tabunoki on its ground is the sort of trunk most oaks never reach. The Environment Ministry measured it in the year 2000 and recorded its health as good. A second tabunoki at the same shrine, 3.31 metres, stands as its junior by a clear two metres of girth. Machilus thunbergii does not usually get this far. It is an evergreen laurel of the warm coastal belt, dense and broad and unhurried once it is up, and a specimen over five metres round is the kind of thing that survives because the ground under it was never ploughed, never built on and never sold. Shrine ground, in other words. What is missing is everything else. Two searches for the shrine by name found no history, no photograph, no dating, not even a tourism listing. Even the position is an estimate taken from the surrounding district rather than a pin somebody set at the trunk, which is why this page calls the location approximate and means it. If you know Nokanmuri you can settle both questions for us: where exactly it stands, and how old anyone there believes it to be.