The Propped Pine of Gionnosu

Kagoshima protects 38 trees by name and not one of them is a pine. That is strange in a port city on a volcanic bay, where the black pine is the tree the whole coast is planted with. This one stands on the lawn at Gionnosu, on the old battery embankment beside the relocated stone bridges, and it is held up. A dozen wooden props carry limbs that run almost horizontally out from a short trunk, in the shape a garden pine only takes after decades of being trained into it. Somebody thought it was worth the trouble. When a surveyor mapped the trees of this park in June 2025, every other one went down as an avenue tree and this one alone was marked a landmark. Past that there is nothing. It is on no register, no Japanese page names it, and we have found no age, no girth and no planting date. The ground under it is older than the lawn suggests: the park opened in April 2000, but it was laid out on the Gionnosu battery built under Shimazu Nariakira, so a coastal pine standing here could be considerably older than the park around it. If you have stood in front of it, tell us what the board says.