The Grand Ginkgo of Goo Shrine

The guardians at this shrine gate are wild boars rather than the usual stone lion-dogs, and the tree behind them is the tallest thing on the grounds. Kamigyo Ward measures the ginkgo standing north of the main hall at 25 metres, with a trunk 3.18 metres around, the largest of six sizeable ginkgos in the precinct. A Kyoto travel description puts the shrine's big ginkgos at several hundred years old. That is an estimate rather than a measured figure and nobody has narrowed it since, so several hundred years is as close as anyone can honestly get. The boars are for Wake no Kiyomaro, the eighth century official the shrine honours. In 769 he blocked the monk Dokyo's attempt to have himself made emperor, and was exiled and, by the shrine's telling, crippled for it; a herd of wild boars is said to have escorted him to safety, after which his legs recovered. That is why people come here to pray for their legs and feet rather than for exam results, and why boars sit where lion-dogs usually do. In the last days of November the ginkgo turns, the whole crown going gold at once and then dropping most of it inside a week. The shrine faces Kyoto Gyoen's west wall on Karasuma-dori, five minutes from Marutamachi station.