Miharu Takizakura (Miharu Waterfall Cherry)

The 2011 earthquake left this tree unharmed. A snowfall six years earlier nearly did not. In January 2005 heavy snow broke several branches, and local residents built wooden props to carry the weight. The props are still there, and so is the tree. It is a weeping Edo-higan of the beni-shidare form, and its name means waterfall cherry: a crown 22 metres across east to west and 18 north to south, coming down in pink strands. Around 300,000 people a year come to stand under it. Cuttings have gone abroad as goodwill gifts to Bhutan, Poland, Taiwan, Britain and the United States, among others. The age given everywhere is over a thousand years, with no dating method behind it, so read it as tradition rather than measurement. The other figures are no tidier: sources put the height at both 12 and 19 metres and the girth at 7.9, 9.5 or 11.3, and none of them explains the gap. It was designated a National Natural Monument on 12 October 1922, in the same first batch as Jindai-zakura and Usuzumi-zakura, and Japanese sources say it was the first cherry tree ever given that status. It stands about 60 kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi plant. Visitors stopped coming after 2011 and were back within a year. Entry costs 500 yen during the bloom and nothing outside it. The shuttle bus from Miharu station runs only while the tree is flowering.