Otoyo maps one tree: Sugi no Osugi, a Special Natural Monument at Yasaka Shrine so famous it gave its name to the railway station. Two cedar trunks rise from one base, locally called the Meoto Sugi, the married-couple cedar, credited by legend to the storm god Susanoo. Published alone here because the tree itself is the destination, not because Otoyo's research is finished.
0 of 1 visited in Otoyo
1
Sugi no Osugi
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · roughly 3,000 years · Sugi
The railway station is named after the tree. Get off at Osugi on JR Shikoku's Dozan Line, walk 800 metres, and there it is on the grounds of Yasaka Shrine: two cedar trunks rising from one base, the southern about 60 metres tall and roughly 20 metres around at root level, the northern a little under that at 56. Locally they are the Meoto Sugi, the married-couple cedar.
Japan made it a National Natural Monument in 1924 and upgraded it to Special Natural Monument in 1952, which is among the highest designations the country gives a tree. In 1990 it went onto the New Japan Famous Trees 100 list.
The age everyone quotes is 3,000 years, and it is legend rather than dendrology. The same tradition credits the planting to Susanoo, the storm god of the old chronicles. Nobody has dated the wood, so read the number as a measure of how long this cedar has been revered rather than as an age.
Entry costs 200 yen, and the charge is not incidental. What threatens the tree now is not disease but the ground itself, compacted by decades of visitors standing exactly where you are about to stand. Otoyo Town runs the conservation work with prefectural and national support, and the entry fee pays for part of it.
Read more and get directions →