The tree stands next to a bathhouse.
Hinoki Cypress
Chamaecyparis obtusa
Hinoki is the most valued softwood in Japan, the timber the Ise shrines are rebuilt in every twenty years and the smell people mean when they say a Japanese bath smells of wood. We map 3 of them, in 3 cities.
A working forest fells a cypress long before it reaches real girth, so the big ones stand almost entirely on shrine and temple ground, where somebody decided long ago they were not for cutting. The Japanese ones fit that pattern: one beside a bathhouse in the mountains outside Hiroshima, the other in a prefectural monument grove near a hall where sacred dances are performed, both over three metres round and undocumented beyond one government measurement. The third breaks the pattern entirely. Boston's Larz Anderson hinoki has spent all 289 of its years in a pot, started in 1737 and shipped from Yokohama to Brookline in 1913, now rotated through a pavilion at the Arnold Arboretum a few weeks at a time.
Hiroshima
Boston
This tree is 289 years old and it fits on a table.
Higashi-Hiroshima
Hinoki is the wood the shrines are made of.
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