Tsukazaki no Kusu

This camphor grows out of the top of a grave. Tsukazaki Kofun No. 1 is a round burial mound in a cluster raised from the fourth century onward, and the tree stands on its crown: 14 metres round at chest height, 25 metres tall, one of the largest camphors in Kagoshima Prefecture and by one local reckoning the third largest after the Gamou and Shibushi trees. Whether anyone put it up there on purpose is not recorded anywhere. The town gives the age as 1,200 to 1,300 years and more, a round figure it publishes without saying how it was reached, so the mound was already old ground long before the tree took it over. A heart-shaped hollow opens at the base, and the local story is that a serpent lives in it. Another tradition here reads a snapping branch as a warning of war. It is the sacred tree of Tsukazaki Otsuka Shrine, which makes this a Shinto site standing on an archaeological one, and one report credits more than fifty other plant species growing on its own bark and limbs. It has been in trouble and has come back. Decay and hollowing were serious enough that recovery work began in 2007, and a boardwalk went in during 2013 to keep visitors' feet off the roots. It came through the typhoons of 2022, and the town now describes it as growing vigorously. Take the boardwalk carefully in the wet.