Kawago no Okusu (The Great Camphor of Kawago)

A monk once carved a two-and-a-half-metre Buddha into this camphor's hollow trunk. The carving is gone now, destroyed during Japan's anti-Buddhist purges of the 1870s, but a bronze image hidden inside the same trunk survived and now sits in a hall nearby. Local tradition puts the Kawago no Okusu at roughly 3,000 years old, though nobody has measured that precisely. What is measured is the trunk: 21 metres around at the base, among the widest of any tree in Japan and enough to rank fifth nationally by girth. The crown spreads 27 metres in every direction and rises 25 metres up. Japan designated it a natural monument in 1924, more than seventy years before the small park built specifically around it opened in 1995. The trunk is hollow enough to enter, and inside its southwest cavity stands a stone shrine to the fox deity Inari, tended long after the carved Buddha it once sheltered was lost. The tree has outlived the monk who carved it, the era that destroyed the carving and the empire that ruled either time, and it is still doing what it has done for three thousand years by the town's own count: standing in a village in Saga Prefecture, growing. Free to visit, open daily from nine to five, closed around New Year. A community bus from Takeo-Onsen Station stops two minutes' walk away.