Somebody laid 420 steps up a mountainside so that people could reach one tree. They end at the Itoshiro cedar, a Japanese cedar of about 14 metres round, although the sign at its foot says 13.1, and the only tree in Gifu Prefecture holding Japan's highest heritage tier. It was made a National Natural Monument on 9 December 1924 and promoted to Special National Natural Monument in July 1957. Its age is given everywhere as over 1,800 years, by the prefectural tourism board, by Wikipedia, by Wikidata, and no source names a dating method, so take it as the figure everyone repeats rather than as a measurement. The legend is more precise than the arithmetic. The priest Taicho, who opened Mount Hakusan to religious practice, is said to have planted his walking staff here and left it to grow. The tree stands on the Mino Zenjo-do, the ascetic route up Hakusan, so for centuries the people who passed it were on their way somewhere else. Half of it is dead. One side of the trunk has died back and the other has not, which is ordinary in cedars this old and is what makes the living half worth the climb, green and running the full 25 metres. The approach from the car park by Hakusan Chukyo shrine is 300 metres and 90 vertical, and there is no fee and no gate. Check the forest road before you set out, because landslides and fallen trees have closed it.
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Getting there
Itoshiro, Shirotori-cho, Gujo, Gifu Prefecture, Japan (within Hakusan National Park, on the Mino Zenjo-do pilgrim trail)
You can recognise it by one side of its trunk being dead while the other stays green and living, at the top of 420 steps built specifically to reach it. It stands on the Mino Zenjo-do pilgrim trail above Itoshiro.
Free, public. Reached by a maintained hiking path with 420 stone/concrete steps from a parking area near Hakusan Chukyo Shrine, about 300m distance and 90m elevation gain; roughly a 2-hour approach including the drive/bus from Mino-Shirotori. No entry fee or gate. Note: as of 2025 the forest access road to the trailhead has had closures from fallen trees and landslides, restricting general access at times; check current road status before travelling.
Nearest station Mino-Shirotori (Nagaragawa Railway), then bus/drive roughly 50 minutes to Itoshiro, then the 300m/420-step trail on foot.
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.