The Great Mulberry of Usune

Japan made this tree a National Natural Monument in 1956, which is a strange honour for a mulberry. In Gunma a mulberry is a leaf crop, grown low and picked bare to feed silkworms. This one was left alone: Numata City measures it at 13.65 metres tall and 5.67 metres around, and it is widely reported as the largest wild mulberry in the country. It stands on farmland in what was Usune village, inside the Gunma silk story that runs through the Tomioka Silk Mill, now a World Heritage site. Farmers here treated it as a guardian of silkworm rearing, and when frost stripped the mulberry crop on surrounding farms, its leaves fed the worms. By local tradition it also served as a benchmark in a Maebashi domain land survey in 1686. Its age is a dispute nobody has settled. The city repeats the traditional figure of roughly 1,500 years; a 1991 official survey suggested something nearer 300. The Cultural Affairs Agency's own record disagrees on the dimensions too, listing 10.7 metres tall and five metres round at chest height. In 2018 the tree was under treatment for pest damage. Viewing is free and at any hour, along a maintained wooden walkway to the trunk, with parking at Ishizumi Daijingu shrine next door. The walkway is slippery in wet or snowy weather.