The Great Akagi of Uchima

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.