The Great Ginkgo of Tsurugaoka Hachimangu

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.