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.
Sugawara Shrine, Kayano-cho, Yamanaka Onsen, Kaga, Ishikawa PrefectureYou can recognise it by its huge flared base, wider than the trunk above it, rising 54.8m as one of the tallest cedars in Japan. It stands within the grounds of Sugawara Shrine above Yamanaka Onsen.
Free. Stands within the grounds of Sugawara Shrine, open to the public.
Roughly 20 minutes by car or taxi from Daishoji Station on the JR Hokuriku Main Line; the shrine is in the Yamanaka Onsen hot-spring district of Kaga City.
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
- In the official register: 国指定文化財等データベース (Agency for Cultural Affairs)
- ja.wikipedia.org
- kunishitei.bunka.go.jp