Himi maps two trees, neither near the other. Oidani no Otsubaki, Japan's largest known wild camellia, sits in a remote hillside graveyard eighteen kilometres from the city centre; Jonichiji no Icho, one of the largest female ginkgos in the country, stands twenty minutes' walk from Himi Station. Published together under the 2026-08-31 exception: each is the reason to make the trip on its own, not a pair that adds up to a walk.
0 / 2 bezocht in Himi
Foto: さかおり (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Oidani no Otsubaki
Common Camellia (Camellia japonica) · roughly 500 years (the city's own figure); one older published survey gives 700 to 800 years instead · Oidani, Himi City
Japan's thickest wild camellia stands in a village burial ground at the end of a dead-end valley. The Oidani camellia is ordinary yabu-tsubaki, Camellia japonica as it grows in the hills without anyone's help, and the surveyor Miyake Kazuyoshi ranked it first in the country for the species. It measures 3.89 metres round and 7.5 metres tall, spreading 7.9 metres east to west and 11 north to south.
Its age is disputed and we are not going to settle it. Himi City's own cultural-properties page says about 500 years. A 1998 published survey of Japan's giant trees says 700 to 800 instead. Neither explains how it got to its number.
The shape is what people come up here for. It splits into three thick trunks less than a metre off the ground, and their branches have grown back into each other into a tangle solid enough at around two and a half metres up to sit on. Locally it is the Sasumata Camellia, after the Y-shaped pole once used to pin a man against a wall.
The graveyard has a story attached. A samurai of Ikeda Castle executed on a false charge; his widow turned away by her own family and dead of grief; the two buried on the hill facing the castle, with a camellia planted where a stone should have gone. Toyama Prefecture designated the tree in 1965. It opens deep red for about a month from early April.
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Jonichiji no Icho
Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba) · over 1,000 years · Jonichiji Temple, Asahihonmachi, Himi
Most autumns this ginkgo drops around 180 litres of nuts. It is a female tree, said to be the largest female ginkgo in Japan by girth and the largest ginkgo of any sex in Toyama: roughly 12 metres round and 24 metres tall, standing in the grounds of Jonichiji, a Koyasan Shingon temple twenty minutes on foot from Himi station.
It became a National Natural Monument on 20 October 1926, which puts it among the first trees in Japan ever given one. Local tradition holds that the itinerant monk Hodo Shonin planted it in 681, at the temple's founding, as a sacred tree. Taken literally that would make it 1,345 years old; the sources that repeat the legend all round it down to over 1,000 years, and the rounder figure is the honest one. The temple has been nicknamed Ginnan Shoja, the ginkgo hall, for centuries, after the tree rather than the other way round.
A folk remedy attached itself as well: the growths hanging from its limbs were shaved and brewed by women short of breast milk.
It is in good health. A local paper came to see it on 13 November 2025 and found it at the peak of its colour, which is also the week to go.
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