What is the oldest tree in Neba?
Neba's only mapped tree, and its oldest, is Tsukize no Osugi, a Japanese cedar put at roughly 1,500 to 1,800 years old by local tradition. It stands in a purpose-built park in Tsukize, Neba Village, in the southern hills of Nagano Prefecture.
Thirteen point eight metres around and forty metres tall, Tsukize no Osugi is the largest tree in Nagano Prefecture and, on the count most often cited, the sixth largest cedar in Japan. Neba Village has given it a park of its own: parking, restrooms and a viewing pavilion, free to enter. Its age is tradition rather than measurement, somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 years by local reckoning, since nobody has cored it. Nagano Prefecture made it a prefectural natural monument in 1928, and on 13 November 1944 the national government raised it to National Natural Monument as an exceptionally rare giant sugi. It has not gone untouched: heavy snow in February 2014 took a branch off it. Since 2017 the village has been propagating saplings from this tree and planting them nearby, a bet that somebody will still be driving out here to look at a Neba cedar long after this one has gone. It is roughly 60 to 75 minutes by car from the nearest major highway interchange, with limited daily bus service also reaching the site.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.