The Giant Camphor of Naratsuhiko Shrine

Twelve point eight metres around at the ground, and it holds a rope. This camphor stands behind the main hall of a shrine on Narazaka, the pass road that carried travellers into Japan's first permanent capital from the north, which means anyone walking into Nara from Kyoto in the eighth century passed beneath it. It rises about thirty metres and forks into two great limbs some seven metres up, each of which forks again, so from below the crown reads less like a tree than like several trees agreeing to share a base. The prefecture designated it a natural monument in 1951. What makes it worth the bus ride rather than merely worth reading about is the eighth of October. On that evening the shrine performs the Okina-mai, a masked dance recognised as an Important Intangible Folk Cultural Property and one of the oldest surviving ancestors of Noh theatre, and it is danced here, under this tree, as it has been for centuries. Be honest about the thousand years: like almost every great camphor in Japan, the figure is traditional rather than measured. The girth supports it.