The Great Akagi of 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.