The Soapberry with a Bamboo Through It
Nara Park
The trunk is hollow, and a bamboo has grown up inside it and out through the top. Bamboo from the tea house grove behind found the cavity in this soapberry, went up through it and emerged from the crown, so what stands on the bend of the Kasuga approach is one tree wearing another. The shrine's own guide describes the effect as a mother holding a child. At four and a half metres around and over fifteen tall it is claimed as the largest soapberry in Nara Prefecture, and nobody has published an age for it, which is worth saying plainly rather than inventing a number. Its black seeds had two jobs. Strung, they became prayer beads. Loose, they were the weights inside the shuttlecocks of hanetsuki, the New Year battledore game, which is why the tree turns up in old accounts of the season. The pulp around them lathers in water, and that is where the English name comes from: this is the tree people washed with before soap was cheap.
From people who stood here
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Getting there
Nara Park, beside the approach to Kasuga Taisha near the Nara National Museum
You can recognise it by the bamboo growing up through its hollow trunk and out through the crown. It stands on the bend of the Kasuga Taisha approach, near the Nara National Museum.
Free, open parkland at all hours
About 10 min walk from Kintetsu Nara, beside the Nara National Museum
In fruit
October and November, when the translucent amber fruit ripens
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from. The story was written with AI from these sources, and readers who know the tree correct it.
