The Zelkova of Tsutta

Once a year, priests from another town come down to the riverbank under this tree and fill a vessel with water. The record of them doing it runs back to 1759. The date is 26 July. The water goes to Unebiyamaguchi Shrine in Kashihara for its summer festival two days later, and Oyodo Town's own account traces the practice to Horeki 9. Local tradition reaches much further back and credits the planting to Emperor Jinmu or to Empress Jingu, which is legend and should be read as such. The measured version is plainer: about eight metres round at chest height, fifteen metres tall, roughly 700 years old by the town's record, made Oyodo's first town natural monument on 10 February 2003. It used to be a great deal bigger. Four main trunks carried a crown that reached some forty metres from end to end, east to west. Typhoons took three of them, the last in 2002, and what stands now is the survivor, still coming into full green leaf every summer. It is an easy tree to reach and an odd one to find: five minutes on foot from Koshibe Station, hard against the railway and Route 169, on open ground beside a small Inari shrine on the north bank of the Yoshino River.