The Muku Tree of Furosaki Shrine

There is a bus stop called Furosaki Jinja-mae, meaning in front of Furosaki Shrine, and it puts you on the doorstep. Hiroshima Kotsu runs it. That is a piece of luck for a tree this undocumented: a muku of 3.39 metres round on ordinary shrine ground in Kabe-cho, up in the Asakita hills, measured by the Environment Ministry in 2000 and never mentioned in print by anything else we can find. Muku, Aphananthe aspera, is a tree half of Japan has walked past and few can name. It carries small dark fruit in autumn that are sweet enough to eat, and leaves so rough when dried that woodworkers once used them to smooth wood and horn. It seeds easily and grows fast, and it ends up old on shrine ground for the same reason most trees do: nobody there had a reason to cut it. The surveyors left the health column blank on this one, so we cannot honestly tell you what condition it was in even at the turn of the century, and no age has ever been published for it. What we can tell you is that it is over three metres round, and that the bus stops outside. If you get off there, tell us what you find. On this tree, a reader standing in front of it knows more than the record does.