Agarikodaio

Its shape is the work of axes. For generations charcoal burners in the Nakajimadai forest cut this beech off above the winter snowpack, and each cut sent up a new crop of stems from the same living base. In local dialect a tree treated that way is an agariko, a risen-up child. This one is the daio, the king of them: a squat trunk 7.62 metres round splitting into a candelabra of limbs that reach 25 metres. Japan's Forestry Agency surveyed it, listed it among its hundred Forest Giants and dates it at over three hundred years. Nobody has cut it in a very long time, and the stems left standing at that last cut have had generations to thicken into trunks of their own. This is not a temple tree or a shrine tree, which is how most old trees in Japan came through the centuries. It is a working tree that outlived its work. The beech woods around it were fuel, and the deep snow that decided where the woodsmen swung their axes still buries the ground here for months. It stands in Chokai Quasi-National Park, reached on a marked forest path from the Nakajimadai trailhead, and it is now one of the most photographed trees in northern Japan. In leaf, the candelabra vanishes into its own canopy. Before the leaves come, you can read the whole strange frame of it.