Kawazu sits on the east coast of the Izu Peninsula, and its two mapped trees stand about 600 metres apart, both reached from Kawazu Station. The great camphor of Sugihokowakenomikoto-jinja is fifteen metres round, the last survivor of seven great camphors that once stood in the old district. Beside the Odoriko Onsen bathhouse, the Great Cycad of Shinmachi spreads four branches from a ten-metre trunk.
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The Great Camphor of Sugihokowakenomikoto Shrine
Camphor Tree (Cinnamomum camphora) · 1000 years or more · Kawazu, east coast of the Izu Peninsula
Six of the seven are gone. Old Kawazu district was known for the Kawazu-go Nanakakae Nanakusu, its seven great camphors, and by the middle of the Meiji era this was the only one left standing.
It is not the first camphor you meet. Two smaller ones grow near the torii of Sugihokowakenomikoto-jinja, the shrine locals call Kinomiya, and enough visitors have stopped at those that the shrine put up a sign telling them the natural monument is further on. It stands behind and to the left of the main hall: fifteen metres round, twenty-four metres tall, tied for the second-thickest tree in Shizuoka prefecture behind the camphor at Atami.
Published sources put it at a thousand years or more, which in Japan usually means tradition rather than a ring count, and this is no exception. The trunk can be measured, and has been twice. The Environment Ministry's giant-tree survey recorded fourteen metres of girth in 1990 and fifteen in 2001, ranking it nineteenth in the country and then thirty-second. The tree did not shrink; surveyors kept finding giants elsewhere.
Its two famous neighbours on the peninsula, at Atami and at Ito's Kuzumi-jinja, have both hollowed out. This one has not. It has dropped some large branches over the centuries and kept its trunk whole, which at this age and this girth is rare.
A national Natural Monument since December 1936.
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The Great Cycad of Shinmachi
Sago Palm (Cycas revoluta) · 600 to 1000+ years (tradition) · Mine Onsen, Kawazu, east coast of the Izu Peninsula
Four thick branches run along the ground from this cycad's base like the arms of something reaching rather than growing, described in Japanese sources as looking like a giant snake writhing. A central trunk rises about ten metres, unusually tall for a cycad, and the whole clump measures 7.76 metres around at the base, not a single trunk's girth but the combined mass of stem and limbs together.
Tradition places its age anywhere from six hundred to over a thousand years, tied to a story that the tree was already a splendid giant when O-Man, later a consort of Tokugawa Ieyasu and mother of the founders of the Kii and Mito Tokugawa branches, was born on this plot before 1607 to the Masaki family who owned the land. A fire damaged its eastern side in 1916; it recovered, and became a National Natural Monument in 1936, one of only ten individually designated cycads in the whole of Japan. Emperor Showa and Empress Kojun came to see it in June 1981.
Its vigour has declined somewhat in recent years, which the record should say plainly rather than smooth over. It stands a few minutes' walk from Kawazu Station, beside the Odoriko Onsen Kaikan bathhouse and about six hundred metres from the Great Camphor already mapped here, free to see, once a private garden and now a public plot.
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