The Omiyoshi Pine

It is named after a raft of reeds that floated down four rivers and washed up beside it. Tsushima Shrine, upstream, ends its Tenno festival by putting a miyoshi, reeds bound into a raft, into the water; one of them came down the Tenno river into the Saya, into the Kiso and finally into the Ikada, and grounded here. The tree became the Omiyoshi pine. The board dates it to the reclamation of Hirashima new fields in 1646, which if right makes it about 350 years old and puts it on the bank of the Ikada river from the year the field behind it stopped being water. In 1957 the town built a junior high school here, filled in part of the river for the grounds, and the pine ended up inside the school yard, where a couple of generations of pupils grew up with it. The school moved out in January 2008 and only sports grounds remain, which means anybody can walk up to it now. It is thinner than it was, with a hollow at the base that is charred inside, and in an age when pine wilt disease is taking the big black pines all over Japan, a 25 metre one is worth going to see.