What is the oldest tree in Nagano?

This tree shares its name with a more famous Jindai-zakura in Hokuto, Yamanashi, about 100 kilometres away; Jindai-zakura just means age-of-the-gods cherry, a type-name several old cherries across Japan carry, and the two trees are unrelated. This one has its own legend, that the god Susanoo-no-Mikoto planted his walking staff here and it grew into the tree standing today, and a Noh play, Suzakura, is said to be based on it. Its trunk once carried three major limbs; the southern one broke in a windstorm sometime in the 1910s or 1920s, and the two remaining now stand on supports, treated by a tree doctor in 1992 after visibly weakening. Measurements vary with where the tape goes: 11.3 metres round at breast height, 9 to 9.8 metres nearer the roots, two different points on the same tree rather than a disagreement. The age, roughly 1,200 years, is kept as a broad tradition rather than sharpened into a figure. Reaching it means a bus from Nagano Station, then a shared taxi, then a thirty-minute walk, with no parking at the shrine; a rural approach rather than a doorstep visit. It still flowers every spring, late April into early May.