The Akou of 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.