The Great Zelkovas of Negoya Shrine
Two zelkovas flank the path to Negoya Shrine, Tagi on the rice-field side and Hatagi on the dry-field side, and Hokuto's farmers still read their spring in the order the pair comes into leaf: Hatagi first favours a good year for the dry fields, Tagi first favours the rice. Both trunks run past ten metres round, among the largest zelkovas recorded anywhere in Japan, though the two sources that measured them disagree by close to two metres and neither figure is picked as the winner here. Takeda Shingen, the Sengoku-period warlord whose clan held a castle nearby, is said to have passed between the pair about five hundred years ago on his way to pray at the shrine, when they were already old. A 1968 fire hollowed both trunks and snapped a bole; tree surgery roughly a decade ago brought them back from it, and a scatter of ancient boulders at the base of each marks the ground as sacred well before either the fire or the shrine. The prefecture's own record gives no age at all. Tourist pages and a 2025 visitor's account put it somewhere between eight hundred and a thousand years, which is tradition rather than measurement, and worth taking as such.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Negoya Shrine, 5336 Egusa, Sutama-cho, Hokuto-shi, Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan
You can recognise them as the paired giants flanking the sando, Tagi on the rice-field side, Hatagi on the dry-field side, each over ten metres round. They stand at Negoya Shrine's approach.
Free, on open shrine grounds; the pair flanks the sando (approach walkway) to the haiden. Reached by car, about 15 minutes from Sutama IC on the Chuo Expressway; parking sits across the road from the shrine but is unsignposted. No train station or bus route found nearby.
No rail or bus access found; nearest access is by car, ~15 min from Sutama IC (Chuo Expressway). Nearest published Hokuto trees (hok_002, hok_003) are also car/day-trip stops rather than a walking cluster.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
