The Sarukawa Ginkgo

The Satsuma lords passed this tree on their way to Edo. The old Takaoka road ran close by it, a good way east of the modern route, and it was the road the Shimazu used for the sankin-kotai, the enforced march to the shogun's capital and back that every daimyo made. Sarukawa was the checkpoint on it, the gate between Satsuma and the outside. The ginkgo stands 400 metres off the present highway at the foot of a hill, in the loop of an old meander of the Oyodo river, and because nothing tall grows near it you see the crown long before you arrive. It is 11.2 metres round and 30 metres tall by the Environment Agency's survey, and it has been a National Natural Monument since December 1935. The signboard says 800 years and attributes the planting to Shimazu Tadahisa, the clan's founder, who died in 1227. That is where the number comes from: it is the legend converted into arithmetic, not a measurement, and the giant-tree database that records the tree says in plain words that it looks younger. It is a female tree, straight-trunked with few heavy limbs, and it goes gold in the last week of November.