The Great Camphor of Sugihokowakenomikoto Shrine

Six of the seven are gone. Old Kawazu district was known for the Kawazu-go Nanakakae Nanakusu, its seven great camphors, and by the middle of the Meiji era this was the only one left standing. It is not the first camphor you meet. Two smaller ones grow near the torii of Sugihokowakenomikoto-jinja, the shrine locals call Kinomiya, and enough visitors have stopped at those that the shrine put up a sign telling them the natural monument is further on. It stands behind and to the left of the main hall: fifteen metres round, twenty-four metres tall, tied for the second-thickest tree in Shizuoka prefecture behind the camphor at Atami. Published sources put it at a thousand years or more, which in Japan usually means tradition rather than a ring count, and this is no exception. The trunk can be measured, and has been twice. The Environment Ministry's giant-tree survey recorded fourteen metres of girth in 1990 and fifteen in 2001, ranking it nineteenth in the country and then thirty-second. The tree did not shrink; surveyors kept finding giants elsewhere. Its two famous neighbours on the peninsula, at Atami and at Ito's Kuzumi-jinja, have both hollowed out. This one has not. It has dropped some large branches over the centuries and kept its trunk whole, which at this age and this girth is rare. A national Natural Monument since December 1936.