What is the oldest tree in Ofunato?
Ofunato's mapped tree is the Dokonjo Poplar, planted around 1934 and roughly 90 years old, which is not old for a tree but is exactly the point: it survived the 1933 Showa Sanriku tsunami, the 1960 Chile earthquake tsunami and the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, which put it half underwater.
The proprietor's mother planted the poplar behind a shop and home in Okirai shortly after the 1933 Showa Sanriku tsunami; a local paper reckoned in 2018 that an ordinary poplar manages around sixty years and that this one had already passed eighty, the basis for calling it about ninety today. It survived the 1960 Chile earthquake tsunami too, and around 1992 neighbours discussed felling it over lightning risk, a plan that lapsed for want of a budget. Okirai took the worst tsunami damage anywhere in Sanriku-cho on 11 March 2011, and the water rose to roughly half the tree's 25 metres; it stayed standing. Afterwards people began calling it the Do-konjo Poplar, close to gutsy in English. The coast's better known survivor, the lone pine at Rikuzentakata, died from the salt and stands today as a treated, preserved replica; this poplar has no such asterisk, it is simply still alive. When the landowner handed the site to Ofunato City, he made keeping the tree a condition of the gift, and the city opened a public plaza around it in 2018, with a gazebo and benches, now a stop on the national 3.11 memorial route.
See more themed collections of remarkable trees.