What is the oldest tree in Maebashi?
Maebashi's oldest mapped tree is the Great Kaya of Yokomuro, a Torreya nucifera standing on privately held former shrine ground in Fujimi-cho. It measures 8.1 metres round and is one of the Nihon San-dai Kaya, Japan's three great kaya trees, alongside specimens in Saitama and Hamamatsu.
The age is genuinely contested rather than merely approximate. A 1991 government conservation survey called it just over 300 years old; the shrine tradition on site says over 1,000. Neither has the last word, and both are recorded rather than one being picked as correct. A Suwa Shrine occupied this ground from 1749 until 1907, when it was relocated elsewhere and the Kanazawa family took over the plot; they have kept the tree as sacred ground in the century since, on land that is privately theirs, and let anyone come and look at no charge. The 2000 survey measured it at 24 metres tall with a 17-metre crown spread and a root circumference of 13.2 metres, a genuinely massive specimen for the species. It was named a National Natural Monument in 1920 by most sources, 1933 by one; 1920 is the figure the government's own heritage database uses and the one used here.
One of Maebashi's trees also appears in The Thickest Trunks We Have Measured, a themed collection spanning several cities.