Kagoshima keeps its own list. Since 1974 the city has designated preserved trees one at a time, measured each at 1.5 metres and put a signboard at its foot, so the ages here come from a municipal register rather than from folklore. Number one is a camphor at Kagoshima Shrine. Number eight is a subtropical fig on the flank of an active volcano that the sign dates at a thousand years. Above the harbour, Shiroyama was fenced off for most of the Edo period and never cleared. An hour north stands the largest tree in Japan.
0 of 10 visited in Kagoshima
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The Camphor of Shiroyama
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · at least 300 years · Shiroyama
There is old forest 300 metres from Kagoshima's city hall because a lord gave up on a castle. A local clan built a fortress on this hill in the medieval period, which is where the name Shiroyama, castle hill, comes from. When the Shimazu took Kagoshima they built the flat, tower-less Tsurumaru castle at its northeastern foot instead, abandoned the hill fort within a generation, and closed the slope. Two and a half centuries of nobody going in produced what a 1974 academic survey counted as more than 510 species of higher plant on a hill 107 metres high, several of them recorded in Japan here for the first time. The biggest camphor anyone has measured in that forest stands beside the walking path. The Environment Agency's giant-tree survey gives it 12.9 metres around and 23 metres tall, at 300 years or more. Treat the girth carefully: it was taken at 1.3 metres, which on this tree is still root, and the trunk proper is a good deal narrower. Shiroyama is also where the Satsuma Rebellion ended. Saigo Takamori and a few dozen surviving men held caves on this hillside and came down into the government guns on the morning of 24 September 1877. The whole hill was made a National Natural Monument and a National Historic Site on the same day in 1931.
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Photo: あじさか (CC BY-SA 4.0)
2
The Cycad Where Sperm Was First Discovered
Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) · about 400 years · Shiroyama-cho
In 1896 a botanist in Tokyo looked into a cycad ovule and saw something swim. Until that afternoon, motile sperm belonged to ferns and mosses; seed plants were supposed to have given them up. Ikeno Seiichiro's finding put a swimming sperm cell inside a gymnosperm and moved the line between the two groups, and a few weeks earlier at the same university Hirase Sakugoro had found the same thing in a ginkgo. The plant Ikeno worked from is this one, according to the signboard the Kagoshima Prefectural Museum has set beside it, and an offshoot was later sent to Tokyo and planted at the Koishikawa Botanical Garden. It is not much like a tree. Cycas revoluta is a cycad, a lineage older than any flowering plant, and this one is a low thicket of stiff ferny crowns on a knot of trunks about 5.9 metres tall, put at roughly 400 years old. Kagoshima Prefecture designated it a Natural Monument in 2008 under its full formal title, the cycad in which sperm was discovered for the first time in the world, which is long even by the standards of Japanese heritage names. It sits in the open in Terukuni Park, a two-minute walk from the shrine, with nothing to mark it out but the board.
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Photo: あじさか (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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The Kurogane Holly of Terukuni Park
Kurogane Holly (Ilex rotunda) · about 180 years · Shiroyama-cho
Four national highways die at the crossroads this tree stands over. Route 3 comes down the west coast of Kyushu, Route 10 comes down the east coast, and both of them, with Routes 225 and 226, end at the intersection south of Terukuni Shrine. The holly is at the park's southern corner, the closest tree to that junction. Kurogane holly grows all over southern Japan as a street and garden tree and very rarely gets to this size: 4.85 metres around at 1.5 metres, 13.5 metres tall, about 180 years old by the city's estimate. It is multi-stemmed rather than single-trunked, so the girth is the whole cluster, but the crown it carries is broad and even and reads as one tree from any distance. Kagoshima made it preserved tree number 6 on 20 March 1974, in the first batch the city ever designated. The park is effectively the front garden of the Kagoshima Prefectural Museum, and the shrine beside it enshrines Shimazu Nariakira, the lord who put a reverberatory furnace and a glassworks into Satsuma in the 1850s and sat for the oldest surviving photograph taken by a Japanese photographer, then died at 49 with the works half built. Female hollies of this species carry dense red fruit through the winter, which is most of why anyone plants them.
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4
The Camphor of Kagoshima Shrine
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · about 600 years by the city's estimate, at least 300 by the Environment Agency's · Somuta
Kagoshima's preserved-tree register opens with this camphor. On 20 March 1974 the city designated its first trees under a new ordinance, and number 1 went to the one standing in the middle of the courtyard at Kagoshima Shrine in Somuta. The register gives 7.30 metres around at 1.5 metres, 24.5 metres tall and about 600 years. The Environment Agency measured the same tree at 6.8 metres and 26 metres and put it at 300 years or more, so the older figure is the city's estimate rather than a settled date, and the gap between the two is the honest width of what anyone knows. The shrine carries a second name, Ujise, and a third that only locals use, Uttesa, which is Ujise-sama said in Satsuma dialect. Ujise is thought to describe swirling water, either the eddies at Kanze out in Kinko Bay where the shrine is said to have stood before, or the fast shallows of the Kotsuki River that once ran below this ground. Neither reading is settled. The camphor stands alone at the centre of the grounds, with vines climbing well up the trunk and no sign that it minds. If you know how old it actually is, or anyone has cored it, tell us.
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5
The Ogatama of Nanshu Shrine
Ogatama Magnolia (Magnolia compressa) · about 130 years · Kamitatsuo-cho
The tree whose name means spirit-summoning stands beside two thousand graves. Nanshu Cemetery holds the dead of the Satsuma Rebellion, Saigo Takamori among them, buried on this slope after the fighting ended in September 1877, and the shrine that enshrines him was built next to it later. The ogatama in its grounds is preserved tree number 2, from the city's first designation in March 1974: 3.82 metres around, 13.5 metres tall, about 130 years old. Ogatamanoki is one of the trees Shinto actually uses. Its branches are offered at altars, and the name is usually read as a worn-down form of ogitama, to call a spirit down. It is an evergreen magnolia, dark and dense and completely unremarkable for most of the year. Then in late winter it opens hundreds of small cream flowers whose scent almost everyone identifies, correctly and unhelpfully, as banana. The graves below it run in ranks by battle and by home village. From the top of them you look straight across the bay at Sakurajima, which has been dropping ash on this hillside for the whole 130 years and considerably longer.
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6
The Camphor of Kasuga Shrine
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · about 180 years · Kasuga-cho
Of the 38 trees Kagoshima protects, only two are taller than this one. The camphor in the grounds of Kasuga Shrine runs to 25.5 metres, which puts it third on the city's register behind a ginkgo out at Koyamada and a sweetgum in a school yard at Kiire. It is not especially thick for a camphor, 4.18 metres around, and that combination is the whole character of the tree: it has gone up rather than out, a tall column of trunk in a small walled shrine a few streets back from the harbour, with the crown starting well above the roofs around it. The city made it preserved tree number 24 in March 1976 and estimates it at about 180 years, which would put its start somewhere in the last decades of Satsuma rule. Camphor dominates the city's register, eleven of the 38 trees, and almost all of those eleven stand in a shrine courtyard or a school yard. That is not a fact about camphors. It is a fact about which ground in a port town that burned in 1945 was never cleared for something else.
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7
The Akou of Tagayama Park
Sea Fig (Ficus superba) · about 180 years · Shimizu-cho
Kagoshima is about as far north as this tree can live. Akou, Ficus superba, is a subtropical strangler fig whose range runs up from Taiwan and the Ryukyus and stops around here, which is why four of the city's 38 preserved trees are akou and why almost nobody north of Kyushu has heard of one. It behaves like a fig from further south: it germinates in a crack or on another tree, sends roots down over whatever it started on, and ends up sitting on a fused mat of its own root rather than a trunk. This one is 4.90 metres around, 15.5 metres tall and about 180 years old, preserved tree number 7 from the city's first designation in 1974. It stands in Tagayama Park, on the bluff at the northern end of the harbour, looking straight out across the ferry lane to Sakurajima. Akou drops all of its leaves at once, briefly, usually in spring, and then refoliates within a few weeks, so there is a short window each year when this tree looks dead and is not.
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8
The Kurogane Holly of Gionnosu Park
Kurogane Holly (Ilex rotunda) · about 130 years · Gionnosu
This holly is 15 metres tall on a trunk 2.4 metres round, which for the species is close to the limit, and it stands on ground that was under water when it started. Gionnosu is reclaimed land at the mouth of the Inari River. The city made the tree preserved number 35 in March 1981 and puts it at about 130 years. What sits beside it now is Kagoshima's collection of stone bridges. Five arched stone bridges were thrown across the Kotsuki River about 150 years ago by Iwanaga Sangoro, a master mason brought in from Higo, as part of rebuilding the castle town after the domain got its finances in order. The flood of 1993 destroyed two of them. The surviving three were taken apart and re-erected here at Gionnosu, where Iwanaga himself had worked, the prefecture moving Nishida bridge into a memorial park that opened in April 2000 and the city moving Korai and Tamae bridges into this one. So a holly that has stood here since roughly the 1890s now has three nineteenth century stone arches for neighbours, all of them younger residents than it is, and none of them crossing anything.
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9
The Akou of Yuno
Sea Fig (Ficus superba) · about 1,000 years by the signboard at the tree · Yuno, Sakurajima
The oldest tree in Kagoshima grows on the side of a volcano that has erupted continuously for most of the last century. The signboard beneath it, put there by the city, gives about 1,000 years, which is roughly three times the next oldest figure on the municipal register and rests on nothing anyone has published a method for. Take it as an official estimate. What is measured is the size: 7.40 metres around by the city's reckoning, 6.5 by the Environment Ministry's, the difference almost certainly because two stems fuse about a metre above the ground and the ministry recorded only the thicker one. From any distance it is one tree with one crown. It stands on a lane one street below Route 224, in the hamlet of Yuno on the southern coast of Sakurajima, on a stone revetment above the little port of Yunomotsuki, and a footpath runs down from it to the water. If the age is anywhere near right, this fig was already standing through the Bunmei eruption of the 1470s, the An'ei eruption of 1779, and the Taisho eruption of 1914, which poured enough lava into the strait on the far side of the island to weld Sakurajima to the mainland for good.
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10
The Great Camphor of Kamo
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · at least 900 years on documentary evidence, about 1,600 by the shrine's own reckoning · Kamo, Aira
This is the largest tree in Japan, and it was already being worshipped when the shrine beside it was founded in 1123. That founding record is the hard part of its age: the lord of Kamo brought the Hachiman deity here from Usa and set up the shrine, and the camphor is written down as a sacred tree at the time, which makes it at least 900 years old without anyone having to guess. The shrine's own figure is about 1,600. The measurements are not in dispute. The trunk is 24.22 metres around at chest height and 33.57 metres around at the roots, the tree is 30 metres tall, and the Environment Agency's 1988 national survey of giant trees ranked it first in the country, ahead of the camphor at Kinomiya Shrine in Atami by 32 centimetres. Inside, the trunk is hollow for about 4.5 metres across, roughly the floor of an eight-mat room. It was made a Special Natural Monument in 1952, the highest grade Japan awards, held by only seven things in this prefecture including Yakushima's cedar forest. Legend gives it a different origin: Wake no Kiyomaro, exiled to Osumi in the eighth century, is said to have pushed his staff into the ground here.
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