The shrine this tree served was closed in 1912. The tree is still here, and the descendants of its old parish are still looking after it. Noma no Okeyaki is the largest zelkova in Osaka Prefecture and is said to be the largest in western Japan: 27.37 metres tall with a trunk 13.01 metres round on the town's current figures, splitting into seven main limbs and throwing a crown almost forty metres across. An interpretive sign the board of education put up in 1998 says thirty metres and fourteen, so read the numbers as a range rather than a verdict. Its age is given as over a thousand years, with no measured basis behind that. It was made a National Natural Monument in January 1948, after a survey by the botanist Honda Masaji, and it had stood as the sacred tree of Arinashi-gu, a shrine founded by tradition in 1220. Farmers here used to read the strength of its spring budding as a forecast of the coming harvest. Every early summer brown hawk-owls nest in the canopy and the photographers turn up. A heavy mistletoe infestation nearly finished the tree off before tree doctors began stripping it out in 1994, after which it recovered. One warning. This is Nose Town, twenty-eight kilometres out into the mountains from central Osaka, and in 2024 the bus that served it became a ride-share taxi for residents only. Without a car it is a walk of five kilometres or more from the nearest station.
The line is our estimate of how much there is to see, not a measurement. Typical for this species where this tree stands; exact weeks shift with the year.
Noma-Inaji 251-1, Nose-cho, Toyono-gun, Osaka Prefecture, beside the Noma-Inaji intersection on National Route 477You can recognise it by its trunk splitting into seven main limbs under a crown nearly forty metres across. It stands right beside National Route 477 at the Noma-Inaji intersection, the free Keyaki Museum just east of it.
Free, no gate. Stands right beside National Route 477 at the Noma-Inaji intersection; the town's free Keyaki Museum stands just east of it (open 10:00-17:00 Mar-Oct, 10:00-16:00 Nov-Feb, closed Tuesdays and Wednesdays). Public transport is now limited: the bus that once served it was replaced in FY2024 with a ride-share taxi restricted to town residents, commuters and students, so visitors without a car face a walk of 5km or more from the nearest station.
Nosedentetsu Myoken-guchi Station is the nearest station but is over 5km away with no general-public bus connection since 2024; reaching the tree in practice means a car or taxi
Sources
Where the facts on this page come from.
