The Zelkova of Masukoshi Shrine

The health column for this tree does not say good. It says partly withered: some of the crown is dead, the tree is not. That was the Environment Ministry surveyor's verdict in the year 2000, and it remains the only assessment anybody has published of the zelkova at Masukoshi Shrine, a tree 3.29 metres round on shrine ground in Ato-cho, out in the rural east of Aki-ku. Dieback in an old zelkova is ordinary rather than terminal. The species is the great vase-shaped broadleaf of Japanese towns and shrine approaches, the one that makes a tunnel of leaves over a road, and the timber temple carpenters want for beams and drum makers want for bodies. A veteran tends to lose the top of its crown limb by limb across decades while the rest of it carries on underneath. So what a visitor is likely to meet is a big tree with gaps in it, which is what an old tree looks like when it is being honest. We have not found one other source that mentions this shrine by name, which means no age, no history and no second opinion on its condition in the twenty six years since that survey. If you have stood under it lately, we would genuinely like to know how the crown looks now.