The Great Ginkgo of Shingu Kumano Shrine

Forty-four pillars hold up the Nagatoko and it has no walls at all. The ginkgo standing in front of it is 8.1 metres round. That pairing is what Shingu Kumano Shrine is known for. The hall is protected nationally as an Important Cultural Property; the tree is a Kitakata city natural monument, thirty metres tall, and its age depends entirely on who is telling it. The city gives about 600 years. The shrine calls the ginkgo its goshinboku, its sacred tree, and says over 800. Nobody has cored it, so the two centuries between those numbers are tradition rather than a dispute anybody can settle. What the tree is unambiguously good at is November. One national ranking of autumn foliage spots puts it eleventh in the country and second in Fukushima Prefecture, which for a single tree standing in a village shrine is a strange sort of fame. In the second half of the month the leaves come down and lay a yellow floor between the trunk and the hall's forty-four pillars, and the shrine lights it after dark. Getting there is the part to plan. Kitakata Station is five kilometres off with no direct bus, though on weekdays the town runs an on-demand shared taxi, and it is about ten minutes by car from Shiokawa interchange.