The Shihon-sugi (Four-Trunk Cedar) of Mount Togo

About three or four metres up, this cedar stops being one tree. The trunk divides into four stems, each more than a metre thick, which is where the name comes from: Shihon-sugi, the four-trunk cedar. Japanese accounts describe it as four cedars fused into one, presenting a different silhouette from every angle you walk it from. The Forestry Agency named it one of the 100 Giant Trees of Japan in 2000. After that the sources stop agreeing. The Kinki-Chugoku forest office, which manages the tree, measured 11.5 metres of girth in 2002 and gives the height as 46 metres and the age as 190 years. The Environment Ministry's register, surveying in 1988, recorded 9.9 metres round and no age at all. A hiking page puts the chest-height girth at 14 metres, and one tree-hunter's site matches the register's girth while claiming 30 metres of height and 400 years of age. Somewhere inside that spread stands a very large cedar, and nobody has settled which figures are right. Getting to it is the price of admission. The tree is on national forest land on Mount Togo, up a forest road to a trailhead roughly half an hour's drive from Yuki, then sixty to ninety minutes on foot with a steep finish. Hikers logged the trail as recently as 2022. Wear proper boots, and expect to hunt: it stands on the descent path rather than at any address.