The Akou of Yuno

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.