Takeo no Okusu (The Great Camphor of Takeo)

There is a small stone shrine inside this tree. The camphor's trunk is hollow, roughly twenty square metres across, or twelve tatami mats by the local reckoning, and a hokora to Tenjin stands in the cavity. From outside it measures 20 metres round and 30 metres tall, with a crown spreading more than 30 metres each way, which makes it one of the largest trees in Japan by girth and one of the three biggest in Saga Prefecture. It is the goshinboku, the sacred tree, of Takeo Shrine, founded in 735. Shrine tradition puts the camphor at about 3,000 years old. That figure is tradition rather than a measurement: nobody has counted rings or run a growth calculation, and a camphor of this girth is usually reckoned in the high hundreds to low thousands of years. Either way it was already old when the shrine's first post went into the ground. Takeo City has been nursing it for decades. Restoration work ran from 1994 to 2003, with soil treatment, cables against splitting and sealant in the hollow. In April 2022 the city reported thinner foliage, dead limbs and decay spreading through the trunk, and widened the barrier around the base to let the roots recover. So you look at it from a few metres back now, standing at the end of its own maple-lined path beyond the main hall, which is close enough. It is still here, and it is still the reason to come to Takeo.