Six of Kanagawa's hundred notable trees stand in Kamakura, and every one is inside a temple or a shrine. That is not a coincidence. Kamakura was the seat of government for a century and a half from 1180 and filled with religious houses; the town then shrank back to a village for six hundred years while the precincts stayed exactly where they were, unfarmed and unbuilt. The best known of the six is a ginkgo that blew over in a gale in 2010 and grew back from its own roots.
0 of 6 visited in Kamakura
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The Junipers of Kenchoji
Chinese Juniper (Juniperus chinensis) · about 750 years, reckoned from the temple's founding in 1253 · Yamanouchi
Before the temple there was an execution ground here, and the valley was called Hell Valley. Hojo Tokiyori, who governed Japan as regent and wanted to do it through Buddhism, put a great temple on the site in 1253 and brought the monk Rankei Doryu from Song China to open it; by 1386 Kenchoji was ranked first of Kamakura's five great Zen temples. It has the Zen layout, outer gate and mountain gate and buddha hall and dharma hall in one straight line, and along the path between the gate and the buddha hall a row of old junipers stands on both sides. Temple tradition says Rankei brought the seed with him from China and planted them. The thickest is the middle one of three on the left, 6.5 metres round and 13 metres tall, throwing limbs out sideways. What makes the tradition worth repeating is what happened to everything around them: the halls burned down repeatedly over the centuries and the junipers did not, and the buddha hall standing there now is not even originally Kamakura's. It was the mausoleum of the second Tokugawa shogun's wife, moved here from Shiba in Edo in 1647.
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2
The Great Ginkgo of Tsurugaoka Hachimangu
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · the standing tree is regrowth from 2010; the original was traditionally called a thousand years and was not · Yukinoshita
At about four in the morning on 10 March 2010, in a gale, it came out of the ground. The great ginkgo beside the stone steps at Tsurugaoka Hachimangu had been a prefectural Natural Monument since 1955 and was 30 metres tall and 6.7 metres round, and it fell at the one hour of the day when nobody was standing under it. What is there now is not a replacement planted in its place. Shoots came from the root stock that stayed in the ground, and the tree beside the steps is that regrowth, fifteen years old above ground and rooted in something much older. The tradition attached to the original is the reason anyone knows it. On the night of 27 January 1219 the third Kamakura shogun, Minamoto no Sanetomo, was cut down on these steps by his nephew Kugyo, who by the story had been hiding behind this tree, and the line of shoguns that Yoritomo founded ended after three men and twenty-seven years. Hence the name, Kugyo's hiding ginkgo, and hence the thousand years people gave it. The thousand years is the weak part: ginkgo is widely held not to have reached Japan by 1219, and the tree was never the size that age implies.
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3
The Tabunoki of the Goryo Shrine at Sakanoshita
Japanese Bay Tree (Machilus thunbergii) · Sakanoshita
The Enoden train runs across this shrine's approach. Goryo Shrine at Sakanoshita sits behind Hase, and the level crossing at its torii is one of the most photographed spots in Kamakura, because the little green and cream train passes within a couple of metres of the shrine steps. Most people are there for the train. The tabunoki behind it is 20 metres tall, a Kamakura City Natural Monument and one of the six Kamakura trees on Kanagawa's list of a hundred notable trees. Tabunoki is an evergreen of the laurel family that grows along warm coasts, and this is close to the sea; its new leaves come out bronze in spring before turning, which on a tree this size is a fortnight of the whole crown looking rusty. The shrine is dedicated to Kamakura Gongoro Kagemasa, a warrior who by the tale of the Later Three Year War took an arrow in the eye at sixteen, had it pulled out by a comrade who braced a foot on his face, and objected to the foot rather than the arrow. His festival in September involves masks and is one of the odder things in the Kamakura calendar. No age is published for the tree.
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4
The Crabapple of Kosokuji
Hall's Crabapple (Malus halliana) · Hase
Kamakura counts three great crabapples and this is the one people queue for. Kaido, Malus halliana, is a Chinese crabapple grown for about ten days a year: in early April it opens deep pink buds on long thin stalks that hang the flowers downward, so the whole tree looks like it is dripping. The one in the small courtyard at Kosokuji is a Kamakura City Natural Monument and is on Kanagawa's list of a hundred notable trees, and the courtyard is small enough that in season there is not much room to stand. The temple behind it is worth the entrance on its own account. Kosokuji was the house of Yadoya Mitsunori, an official of the shogunate, and in 1271 he was holding his own lord's teacher, the monk Nichiren, in a cave in the garden after Nichiren had told the government that its policies were bringing catastrophe on Japan. The cave is still there behind the hall. Mitsunori later converted and turned the house into this temple. Nobody has published an age for the crabapple.
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5
The Weeping Cherry of Jochiji
Weeping Higan Cherry (Prunus subhirtella) · Yamanouchi
Jochiji flowers before the rest of Kamakura does. The tachihigan, the upright form of the higan cherry, opens a good week or more ahead of the somei-yoshino that everyone else waits for, and the one here is 20 metres tall, a Kamakura City Natural Monument and on Kanagawa's list of a hundred notable trees. Higan cherries are the long-lived ones. Almost every famous old cherry in Japan is this species or a form of it, because somei-yoshino is a nineteenth century clone that rarely passes a century, while a higan can run to several. Jochiji sits in a narrow valley off the Kita-Kamakura road, entered by a stone bridge and a flight of worn steps beside a well that is one of Kamakura's ten. It was founded in 1281 for a Hojo who died at 29, and it was ranked fourth of the five great Zen temples, though what stands now is mostly twentieth century: the Kanto earthquake of 1923 flattened the buildings here. The cherry has no published age, which is a pity for a species where age is the point. If you know one, tell us.
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6
The Inumaki of Kakuonji
Buddhist Pine (Podocarpus macrophyllus) · Nikaido
This is the quietest place on this page and the hardest to get into. Kakuonji sits at the closed end of a valley in Nikaido, past where the tourist route gives up, and for most of the year the inner precinct is seen on a guided round at set times rather than wandered through. The inumaki in it is 18 metres tall, a Kamakura City Natural Monument and one of Kanagawa's hundred notable trees. Inumaki, Podocarpus macrophyllus, is a conifer that does not look like one: long flat strap-shaped leaves, dark and dense, and a fruit that is a green nut sitting on a swollen red stalk which is edible while the nut is not. It is the standard tree of a temple hedge in warm Japan and it takes clipping forever, so a free-grown one at 18 metres is a different object from the ones people know. The temple was founded in 1218 by the regent Hojo Yoshitoki after, the story goes, a dream, and it holds a hall of the twelve heavenly generals and a hillside of cave tombs cut into the valley walls. No age has been published for the tree.
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