Sea Fig

Its range runs up from Taiwan and the Ryukyus and gives out around southern Kyushu, which is why nobody further north has heard of one and why Kagoshima alone protects four by name. The oldest sits on the side of an active volcano: the city's own signboard puts it near a thousand years, a figure three times the next-oldest tree on the register and resting on no published method, so take it as an official estimate rather than a measurement. At Nojima Shrine on the Nichinan coast, akou figs pour their roots over walls and rock through the whole precinct, and almost every visitor assumes the entire grove is protected; only one tree there carries the 1941 national designation. In Okinawa, the akou of Amaku is 19.5 metres round on a tree ten metres tall.