The Married Camphor of Nankunsha

At ground level this camphor splits cleanly into two trunks rising from one root, and that accident of growth turned it into a wedding-day landmark. The Meoto-kusu, literally the Married Couple Camphor, stands at the gate of Nankunsha inside Sumiyoshi Taisha, roughly 800 years old and nearly eight metres around at its widest trunk. Couples visiting the shrine for a ceremony, or hoping to arrange one, stop here before anywhere else, and the tree shows up on more Sumiyoshi Taisha souvenirs than any of the shrine's own buildings. It shares its small precinct with an older, single-trunked neighbour, the Sennen-kusu, and the two are usually mentioned in the same breath, though sources agree they are separate trees with distinct measurements and roughly two centuries between their ages. Like its neighbour, the Meoto-kusu carries an Osaka City preserved-tree designation. Both grow on ground that has hosted Shinto worship since Sumiyoshi Taisha's legendary third-century founding, the kind of continuously used shrine land that let a tree like this get old in the first place, never cleared for redevelopment the way so much of the rest of the city has been. What the couples actually want is simpler than any of that history: a photograph beside the split trunk, and whatever luck a shrine can offer on the way to the altar.