The Namba Shrine Camphor

In 1811 a theatre manager named Uemura Bunrakuken opened a puppet theatre in Namba Shrine's courtyard, and the venue's nickname eventually gave its name to an entire art form: Bunraku, Japan's classical puppet theatre, is named for the man who staged it here, under this camphor's shade. The tree itself predates that history by two centuries or more, close to 400 years old today, and it holds a distinction unrelated to puppetry. It was the first tree ever named to Osaka City's official preserved-tree register. Shrine buildings around it did not fare as well. Namba Shrine burned completely in the March 1945 Osaka air raids and was not rebuilt until 1974. The four-hundred-year age given to this camphor today only works if it is the same tree that came through that fire still standing, on a plot that briefly had nothing else left. It grows a five-minute walk from Shinsaibashi, one of central Osaka's busiest shopping streets, largely unnoticed by a crowd with somewhere else to be. The shrine's own history reaches back further still, to a legendary founding under the fifth-century Emperor Hanzei, though the current site dates only to a 1597 relocation. Whatever the exact count, this camphor has outlasted every structure that has ever stood beside it.