The Great Ginkgo of Haraedo Shrine

Before you reach Kasuga Taisha itself, the approach path stops at a small purification shrine, Haraedo, where visitors were traditionally meant to be cleansed before going on to the main sanctuary. Its ginkgo has stood over that ritual for more than three centuries. Four metres and thirty centimetres round and twenty-five metres tall, with some dieback in the crown by the time the national survey measured it in 2000, which for a tree this size is ordinary rather than a warning. Ginkgo biloba is the oldest surviving tree lineage on Earth, essentially unchanged for two hundred million years, and it exists today mostly because people kept planting it around temples and shrines for a thousand years rather than because it thrives in the wild. This one earned its place at Haraedo the way most did, as a shrine tree rather than a survivor of anything. Kasuga Taisha's own walking guide names it directly, the only ginkgo it names anywhere on either of its two forest routes, and says plainly what to come back for: not the ritual, but late autumn, when the tree turns and draws people who never knew Haraedo existed. It stands on the free public approach, well before the ticketed inner precinct that holds the shrine's famous stone lanterns, so nobody needs a ticket to see it turn.