Tsukize no Osugi

Thirteen point eight metres around and forty metres up, this is the largest tree in Nagano Prefecture and, by the count most often quoted, the sixth largest cedar in Japan. It stands in Neba, a village in the southern Nagano hills that has built the tree a park of its own: parking, restrooms, a viewing pavilion, no charge. The age is tradition rather than measurement. Local reckoning puts it somewhere between 1,500 and 1,800 years, and nobody has cored it, so the figure is inherited rather than dated. Read it as a statement about how long this cedar has been old to the people living under it. The protection is documented. Nagano Prefecture made it a prefectural natural monument in 1928, and on 13 November 1944, with the country deep in a war it was losing, the national government raised it to National Natural Monument as an exceptionally rare giant sugi. It is not 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, which is a local government placing a bet several centuries long: that somebody will still be driving out here to look at a Neba cedar long after this one has gone.