What is the oldest tree in Nikaho?
Agarikodaio, a Japanese beech in the Nakajimadai forest within Chokai Quasi-National Park. Japan's Forestry Agency dates it at over 300 years and lists it among its hundred Forest Giants. It is the only tree mapped here, published alone because the tree itself is the destination.
Agarikodaio's age comes from a Forestry Agency survey rather than a ring count, and the figure it gives is a floor, over 300 years, not a settled number. What is not in doubt is how the tree got its shape: generations of charcoal burners cut it back above the snowpack, and each cut sent up a fresh crop of stems from the same living base. In the local dialect that makes it an agariko, a risen-up child, and this one is the daio, the king of them, a trunk 7.62 metres round breaking into a candelabra of limbs 25 metres up. Nobody has cut it in a very long time, and the stems left standing at that last cut have thickened into trunks of their own. Unlike most old trees that survive in Japan, this is not a temple or shrine tree kept for its sanctity; it is a working tree that outlived its work. It stands on a marked forest path from the Nakajimadai trailhead, in Chokai Quasi-National Park, free and open, with no train station within reach. In leaf its strange frame vanishes into the canopy; before the leaves come, the whole shape is visible at once.
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