Kaga maps one tree: Kayano no Osugi, a Japanese cedar at Sugawara Shrine above the hot-spring town of Yamanaka Onsen. At 54.8 metres tall and 9.6 metres round, it is among the largest sugi in Japan, estimated at roughly 2,300 years old from a 1928 assessment by the botanist Manabu Miyoshi. Emperor Showa, a trained biologist, stopped to examine it in 1947, which gave it the name Tenran no Osugi, the cedar the Emperor viewed. Published alone here because the tree is the destination, not because Kaga's research is finished.
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Kayano no Osugi
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · roughly 2,300 years · Yamanaka Onsen
Emperor Showa was a trained biologist, and in 1947, in Ishikawa for the National Sports Festival, he stopped at this cedar and examined it closely. It has been Tenran no Osugi, the great cedar viewed by the Emperor, ever since. On the paperwork it is Kayano no Osugi, and it stands in the grounds of Sugawara Shrine above the hot-spring town of Yamanaka Onsen.
The tree is 54.8 metres tall, 9.6 metres round at chest height and 11.5 metres where the roots flare into the ground, which puts it among the largest sugi in Japan. Its age of roughly 2,300 years comes from an assessment the botanist Manabu Miyoshi of Tokyo University made in 1928, so it is an estimate with a date attached: any figure quoted from Miyoshi wants another hundred years added to reach the present.
The Emperor was not the first to give it a long look. In 1915 the artist and potter Rosanjin, staying at an inn nearby, drew it in ink. Japan designated it a National Natural Monument in November of the same year Miyoshi dated it, 1928.
Size here is not the same as frailty. In 2016 certified arborists ran an acoustic-wave assessment of the trunk and found no loss of vigour and no branch-fall hazard. The grounds are free and open, about twenty minutes by car from Daishoji station.
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