The Dokonjo Poplar

The 2011 tsunami put this poplar half under seawater and it stayed standing. It is not an old tree, and its age is not the point. The proprietor's mother planted it in the backyard of a shop and home in Okirai shortly after the Showa Sanriku tsunami of 1933, which makes it about ninety; a local paper reckoned in 2018 that an ordinary poplar manages around sixty years and that this one had already passed eighty. It came through the Chile earthquake tsunami of 1960 as well. Around 1992 the neighbours discussed felling it because they were worried about lightning, and nothing happened, for want of a budget. Okirai took the worst tsunami damage anywhere in Sanriku-cho on 11 March 2011 and was very nearly erased. The water rose to roughly half the tree's 25 metres. Afterwards people began calling it the Do-konjo Poplar, which comes out in English as something close to gutsy. The better known survivor of this coast, the lone pine at Rikuzentakata, died of the salt and stands today as a treated replica of itself; this one is simply still alive. When the landowner handed the ground to Ofunato City he made keeping the tree a condition of the gift, and the city built a public plaza around it, opened in 2018, with benches and a gazebo. It is a registered site on the national 3.11 memorial route. No source we found names which poplar it is, so if you know, tell us.