Ticket needed. Paid entry, 200 yen per adult, which funds the tree's own protection; free for the walk to the shrine grounds otherwise. Roughly 800 metres on foot from Osugi Station on JR Shikoku's Dozan Line.
Sugi no Osugi
roughly 3,000 yearsJapanese Cedar
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.
The button above opens directions in your maps app. 800 metres on foot from JR Shikoku Dozan Line's Osugi Station, named after the tree itself.
- Species
- Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica)
- Age estimate
- roughly 3,000 years
- Location
- Yasaka Shrine, Sugi, Otoyo, Nagaoka District, Kochi Prefecture (Sugi)
- Access
- Paid entry, 200 yen per adult, which funds the tree's own protection; free for the walk to the shrine grounds otherwise. Roughly 800 metres on foot from Osugi Station on JR Shikoku's Dozan Line.
- Getting there
- 800 metres on foot from JR Shikoku Dozan Line's Osugi Station, named after the tree itself.
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