The Kaya of Nigatsu-do

Nara's most famous tree at Nigatsu-do is a cedar of about sixty years, a replanting after the typhoon of 1961. Four metres round and two to three centuries old, this one is neither famous nor young, and almost nobody looks at it. It is a kaya, Torreya nucifera, which is not a common thing to find at this size anywhere. The species grows so slowly that its timber is the material Japanese go and shogi boards are cut from, and a single board can take a tree's lifetime to earn. Four hundred and ten centimetres of girth on a kaya is therefore a great deal more time than the same figure on a cedar or a camphor. The national survey put it at twenty-seven metres and in good health, and recorded that it can be picked out from a distance, which on this slope means from the path below rather than from among the buildings. Nigatsu-do is the hall whose balcony gives the view back over Nara, and where the Omizutori fire and water rites run every March. The tree stands in that company without a plaque or a legend to its name.