What is the oldest tree in Naha?
The oldest tree near Naha is the great akagi of Uchima in Urasoe, which Okinawa's register of notable trees puts at about 400 years. It is 18 metres tall with a trunk 4.25 metres round, it stood over the village well, and it is one of the few large trees in the area that came through the Battle of Okinawa.
Okinawa's register answers this better than most, because it publishes an estimated age alongside the height and girth for each of its hundred notable trees. The oldest near Naha is the akagi at Uchima in Urasoe at about 400 years, ahead of the Shuri Kinjo grove at over 200 and the banyan at Takara at 150. But the more useful thing the register records is what happened in 1945. The Battle of Okinawa destroyed Shuri and its castle almost completely, and the prefecture's note on the Shuri Kinjo akagi says that before the war many trees of that size grew around the castle and that nearly all of them burned, leaving only a few. The Uchima entry says the same thing about that tree in one line: it is one of those that survived the ravages of the war. So an old tree in Naha is a survivor first and an old tree second, and the honest reading of the age column here is that it counts the years a tree lived through rather than the years it simply grew. Getting to Uchima: about 8 km north of central Naha in Urasoe.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.