The Weeping Cherry of Kega-kuyoto

The tree is named for something that is no longer there. Kuyoto means a memorial tower, and one is said to have stood on this spot on the old Enshu Kaido, the highway running south out of Iida. The tower went. The name stayed, and so did the place names on the slope beside it, which date from the Sengoku wars. What stands there now is a weeping cherry fifteen metres tall with a trunk 3.8 metres round, its branches falling down the roadside embankment rather than out across the road. Iida made it a municipal natural monument on 22 November 2000. The city and an independent Nagano travel writer both put it at roughly 350 years, and tradition holds that people living here planted it while the Wakisaka clan held Iida Castle, between 1617 and 1672. That is a story kept locally rather than a record in an archive. It fits the age without proving it. Neighbours still look after the tree, along with two stone lanterns and an Akiba Shrine marker, and they keep a lamp burning there. In blossom season it is lit at night. Two things we do not know. Neither source gives a coordinate for the trunk, so our pin marks Kega Station, about ten minutes' walk away. And neither names the cultivar, only shidarezakura, weeping cherry. If you can settle either, tell us.