The Great Zelkova of Shinmeigu

A poem about a circus came out of this shrine yard. Nakahara Chuya spent part of his childhood in Kanazawa, and the acrobats he watched in the precinct here are said to be behind Sakasu, one of the best known poems in modern Japanese; Muro Saisei played on the same ground. The shrine was important to the Maeda lords and ordinary people called it Oshinme-san. The zelkova in the yard is 33 metres tall on a trunk 7.8 metres round, which makes it the thickest of its species in Ishikawa alongside one at Nanao, and it is somehow missing from the Environment Ministry's national database of giant trees altogether. It looks in places like two trees fused, though nobody has established whether it is. The thousand years on the board belongs to the shrine's account of itself rather than to any measurement of the tree, and the honest position is that the tree is very large and undated. Zelkova is the wood Japanese temples are built from, straight-grained and hard, which is one reason so few of this size survived anywhere. This one is a few minutes over the Saigawa bridge from the busiest crossing in the city.