What is the oldest tree in Koriyama?
Akatsu no Katsura, standing beside a rural road toward Aizu-Nunobikiyama west of the city. Japan designated it a national natural monument in 1941 and dated it at over 350 years, a floor rather than a settled figure. It is the only tree mapped here, published alone under the single-tree exception.
The 1941 designation record is also the clearest evidence of what Akatsu no Katsura has lost since. It described a tree over 30 metres tall with a crown spreading about as wide; typhoons and root erosion have since taken it down to 25 metres and a 20 metre spread. What survives is still one of the largest katsura in Japan: a trunk 3.5 metres through at chest height that stops being a single stem about 1.2 metres up, where fourteen trunks of wildly different sizes climb out of it. Old katsura routinely split into multiple stems near the base; very few do it on this scale, or keep doing it while visibly shrinking from storm damage. Its age, over 350 years, comes with no published basis, so treat it as a floor rather than a verdict. It stands unfenced on a rural road toward Aizu-Nunobikiyama, west of the city, with no station within reach; our coordinates mark the area rather than the exact trunk, so expect a short hunt on arrival. If you know what actually dates it, tell us.
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