The Ogatama of Nanshu Shrine

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.