Almost every old tree on Okinawa died in three months of 1945. The Battle of Okinawa burned Shuri and most of what grew on it, and the prefecture's own note on its most famous grove says so plainly: before the war there were many great akagi around the castle, and now there are a handful. So these trees are not simply old, they are the ones that were not hit. Every one is on the prefectural register of a hundred notable trees, and several are looked after by the neighbourhood association rather than by anybody official.
0 of 6 visited in Naha
1
The Great Akagi of Shuri Kinjo
Bishop Wood (Bischofia javanica) · over 200 years · Shuri Kinjo
Japan designated this grove a National Natural Monument on 15 May 1972, the day Okinawa was returned to Japan. There were six trees then and there are five now, one having gone down in a typhoon. They stand in the precinct of Uchikanagusuku-utaki, a sacred grove in a residential street just south of Shuri Castle, and the prefecture's own note is blunt about why they matter: before the war many akagi of this size grew around the castle, and almost all of them were burned, so that only a few are left anywhere. The largest here is 5.2 metres round. What makes them worth standing under is not size but what is living on them. The trunks carry ferns and climbers as epiphytes, bird's nest fern and hare's foot fern and a native fig among them, so what you are looking at is not a tree so much as a vertical habitat. The neighbourhood association still holds its new year prayers and its muchi festival here, and cleans the precinct. Uchikanagusuku-utaki is where the origin of the muchi rice cake festival is told.
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2
The Akou of Amaku
Sea Fig (Ficus superba) · Amaku
Nineteen and a half metres round, on a tree ten metres tall. That ratio is the giveaway: this is not a trunk in the ordinary sense but a strangler fig that seeded itself on Ryukyu limestone and has poured itself over the rock ever since, splitting into twelve separate stems and pulling everything within reach into the mass. Okinawa calls this kind of tree an usuku gajumaru, the banyan that grows on a stone wall, because akou will take hold on rock and masonry where nothing else will, and it can kill whatever it germinates on. All sorts of other plants now live on it in turn. It stands in the Amaku green space on Naha's north side, next to a sacred utaki and the Hiranaka spring, both looked after by the Amaku assets preservation association, which is also the tree's registered owner. Naha city entered it into the Environment Ministry's national giant tree database in 2009 and the prefecture certified it in 2015. Nobody has published an age for it, and given how an akou grows, a ring count would not mean much anyway.
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3
The Banyan of Jogaku
Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · about 100 years · Sobe
They moved the road rather than cut this one down. The banyan on the street beside Jogaku primary school stood in a private garden before the war, and when the road came to be widened it was in the way; the city changed the alignment of the road instead, and the tree is now formally a street tree owned by Naha. It is 17.6 metres tall with a trunk 5.5 metres round, going up almost straight before spreading, which is unusual for a gajumaru and gives it a genuinely good canopy. What the place used to be is worth knowing. This stretch was called Kohagura Baba, a horse ground where races were run once a month, and there is a monument of a horse and an explanatory board about the course. Now the tree stands in a tight grid of houses and schools, which is exactly what makes it visible: it is the only large thing for streets in any direction. The prefecture puts it at about a hundred years old, which would date it to somewhere around the 1920s, before the war that took nearly everything else here.
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4
The Banyan of Takara Park
Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa) · about 150 years · Takara
The whole village turned out to carry this tree to where it now stands. Before the war it grew at the Uebaru settlement, and it was moved to the Takara utaki, the sacred site now inside Takara Park, by the people of Takara working together; the account the prefecture keeps says it took everyone. It sits in the forecourt of the prayer place, 8.9 metres tall with a trunk 3.9 metres round that divides from the base into several stems and opens into a rounded, almost conical crown. It has unusually few of the hanging aerial roots that gajumaru are known for, which makes it look less like the archetype and more like an ordinary spreading tree. The prefecture puts it at about 150 years, which means it was already a mature tree when it was dug up and carried. It is a children's playground now, in the plainest sense: this is where the local children climb. The park is public and Naha city owns the tree.
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5
The Great Akagi of Uchima
Bishop Wood (Bischofia javanica) · about 400 years · Uchima, Urasoe
The village well was underneath it, which is why it became a god tree. The akagi at Uchima is about 400 years old by Okinawa's reckoning, 18 metres tall with a trunk 4.25 metres round, and the community has treated it as sacred for as long as anyone records because of the water at its foot. Before the war, village festivals here included demonstrations of kumibo, staff fighting, performed in front of it. Akagi timber has a long history of its own: in the Heian period it went to the imperial court as tribute and was worked into sword hilts, combs, the legs of zithers and the spindles of rank diplomas, and in more recent centuries it was used for windbreaks, for presses that crushed oil seeds, and for the carriages of sugar mills. The official entry ends with one flat sentence that is the reason this tree is on the page at all: it is one of those old trees which survived the ravages of the Second World War, and should be preserved and cared for. Urasoe was on the line of the American advance toward Shuri. Very little else here did survive.
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6
The Great Kuwadisa of Tomari
False Kamani (Terminalia catappa) · about 200 years · Tomari, Nakagusuku
Officials planted it because they were sorry to leave. The tradition recorded on this tree is specific: around two hundred years ago, men sent out from the Ryukyu government at Shuri to run the district office at Nakagusuku came to the end of their posting, and planted this tree at their parting from the villagers of Tomari they had become friendly with. It stands on the national highway where nobody can miss it, and the branches go out in a flat fan that throws a very wide, very low shade, which is what the species does and what it is planted for across the Pacific. Okinawan calls it kuwadisa; Japanese calls it kobateishi or momotamana; English usually calls it tropical almond or, in Hawaii, false kamani, which is the name this site uses for the species throughout. It is 11.5 metres tall with a trunk 3.7 metres round and the prefecture puts it at about 200 years, which matches the story it carries rather than proving it. Nakagusuku made it a village Natural Monument in March 1997, under exactly the name the village uses for it.
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