It is in the graveyard, behind the hall, and it is 8.4 metres round.
Japanese Bay Tree
Machilus thunbergii
Tabunoki, the Japanese bay tree, is the backbone of the evergreen laurel forest that once covered lowland western Japan before farmland replaced it. We map 6 of them, in 3 cities.
What survives mostly survives on shrine ground, soil nobody ploughed, built on or sold, and several stand in exactly that condition: hamlet shrines in the hills north of Hiroshima, each past three metres round and not one line published about it beyond a government surveyor's bare measurement. The record thins further from any city. Kanazawa's Hongakuji tabunoki, 8.4 metres round in a graveyard behind the hall, is the biggest tree in its quarter and one of the least visited. Kamakura's stands beside one of the most photographed level crossings in Japan, where the Enoden train passes within a couple of metres of the torii. Ground bark from this species was once the standard binder in Japanese incense.
Kanazawa
Hiroshima
Somebody measured this tree twice, twenty six years apart, and in between it had put on eleven centimetres.
Most Japanese incense is held together by this species.
Three trees at this shrine were large enough for the national register.
Five metres and twenty eight centimetres round, at a shrine in a hamlet too small to place reliably on a map.
Kamakura
The Enoden train runs across this shrine's approach.
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