Kosugi no Osugi (the Totoro Tree)

People arrive at this cedar carrying umbrellas, so they can stand underneath and recreate a scene from an animated film. From the field below, the tree's two rounded crowns read as a pair of ears, and from about 2020 that resemblance turned a cedar in a village of northern Yamagata into a destination people fly in for. The village had always read the same shape differently. The trunk divides into two cores just above the base, so the tree has long been Meoto-sugi, the married-couple cedar, and Enmusubi no Sugi, the matchmaking cedar. A mountain deity is enshrined at its foot. One local story has a lord of Shinjo, out hunting deer, sheltering under it from a blizzard. The age is genuinely disputed. Japanese Wikipedia gives 700 to over 800 years. Yamagata Prefecture's own landscape register heads the entry with an estimate of 1,000. Neither states a method, so the honest answer is somewhere between seven hundred and a thousand years and nobody has narrowed it. The dimensions are firmer: 6.3 metres around the base, about 20 metres tall, a crown roughly 17 metres across. Sakegawa Village listed it as a natural monument in November 1986. It is free, with a car park and a marked path, about half an hour by car from Shinjo station and no closer by train. The path is not cleared in winter, and this part of Yamagata gets a great deal of snow.