The Machilus Tree of Tsutsuse Hachiman Shrine

Most Japanese incense is held together by this species. Powdered tabunoki bark is the standard binder in a joss stick: mix it with water and it turns to a paste that takes the scent and holds the shape, which is how an unshowy evergreen laurel came to be quietly commercial for centuries. The one at Tsutsuse Hachiman Shrine has clearly not been put to that use. It measures 3.10 metres round and the Environment Ministry recorded it in good health in the year 2000, on shrine ground in Asa-cho, in the northern hills of Asakita-ku. Beyond that, nothing. An exact-phrase search for the shrine's name returns no article, no photograph, no local history page. As far as the written record goes, this tree exists in one document. Machilus thunbergii is a warm-country tree, the backbone of the evergreen laurel forest that once covered lowland western Japan before people cleared it for fields. The patches that survived are mostly shrine groves, so a tabunoki of this size is less an ornament than a piece of the forest that used to be here, kept by accident of who owned the ground. Its age has never been published and nobody has written the shrine up. If you know Tsutsuse, you know more about this tree than the internet does, and we would like you to tell us.