The Ginkgo of Nanshu Shrine

Kagoshima's preservation register holds two trees at Nanshu Shrine, and the ginkgo is the taller by ten metres. Registered in 1974 as preserved tree number 16, it stands 24 metres over the graves of the men who fought and died in the 1877 Satsuma Rebellion, a girth of just under three metres and an age the city puts at about 130 years, roughly what it also recorded for the ogatama magnolia sharing these grounds. Ginkgos are famously slow to die. Individuals in China and Japan have stood for well over a thousand years, so on that scale this one has barely started. What it has already done is weather Sakurajima's ash, which drifts across this hillside on most days and settles on every leaf the volcano can reach. Nobody appears to have re-measured either tree since that original 1974 survey, so the figures on the register are older than most of the visitors reading them. Its one dramatic month is November, when the whole crown turns a single even gold over a cemetery that otherwise asks for quiet.