The Camphor of Kasuga Shrine

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.