The Camphor of 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.