Kitahama no Okayanoki (the Great Kaya of Kitahama)

Japan names three great kaya trees, and this is one of them. It does not stand in a shrine yard or a park. It stands by itself behind a low white fence on private farmland at Motosawai, in Hamamatsu's Hamana Ward, about eight kilometres from Iwata, and you look at it from the road. Nobody has to be asked, and there is a small space to leave a car. The Japanese nutmeg-yew is a slow conifer, and this one, a female, has had roughly six hundred years at it according to the city board of education's own sign. Today it measures 5.4 metres round at chest height and 22.3 metres tall. A 1957 academic survey recorded a considerably larger tree: 6.75 metres round, 27 metres tall, a root collar of 16.5 metres against the 15 measured now. Either it has lost ground over seventy years or the two surveys measured differently. Both figures are on the record and neither is worth averaging away. The shape is what makes the walk. The trunk broadens hard near the ground and then throws its branches southward from about 2.9 metres up, carrying a crown put at 21.5 metres east to west and 25.5 north to south. A visitor who came out to record it in 2009 found no cavity in the trunk and dense foliage all the way up. The state designated it a National Natural Monument on 20 March 1954. Hamamatsu still keeps its file, last reviewed in December 2025.