Shogen-in no Sakasa Gashiwa

This oak looks as though someone planted it upside down. The trunk divides into four thick limbs at ground level, and rather than climbing they run outward along the earth before turning upward, so the branches read as roots that changed their minds. The name says it plainly: sakasa gashiwa, the inverted oak. The canopy off those limbs spreads 22 to 28 metres across. It is the only Daimyo Oak in Japan under national protection, and the first oak of any species to be given that status, designated in December 1929 after the botanist Manabu Miyoshi of Tokyo Imperial University surveyed it in 1922. The sourced estimates put it at roughly 300 years. The temple tells a longer story: its legend credits the planting to Minamoto no Yoriyoshi and his son Yoshiie after the Former Nine Years' War in the eleventh century, and claims 700 years for the tree. That is legend, recorded as legend, and nobody has dated the oak by any other method. The measurements depend on who took them and when. The town gives 630 cm around the base, 240 cm of trunk and 15 metres of height; a 1983 survey instead recorded 450 cm at the root, four limbs of about 2 metres each, and 12.2 metres tall. Different conventions, decades apart. A tree enthusiast photographed it in bud in April 2025 and again in 2026. Shogen-in asks visitors not to step under the canopy, because that soil is what the roots live on.