The Banyan of Jogaku

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.