Nento Hiramatsu

A curse protects this pine, if the story is believed. Around 1716 somebody from a neighbouring island felled an earlier 'brother pine' that stood here and was struck down by illness soon after; the tree planted to replace it is the one standing today, and Iheya has treated it as untouchable ever since. It grows nothing like a normal pine. Wind and salt off the East China Sea have pressed it down to about eight metres tall while its crown spreads twenty-eight metres east to west, low and flat and round, so that a 1937 forestry survey described it as shaped like a garden bonsai rather than a tree. Sources put its age anywhere from two hundred to nearly three hundred years, tradition rather than a ring count, and it has outlived the disease that has killed old pines across much of the rest of Japan: Iheya has no pine bark beetle, the vector for pine wilt, so imports of pine material onto the island are restricted to keep it that way. It is the acknowledged symbol of Iheya, a small island reached only by an eighty-minute ferry from the Okinawan mainland, no bridge and no airport, and it was named a National Natural Monument in 2016 after sixty years as a prefectural one.