Noma no Okeyaki

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.