Wakidani no Tochinoki

Two winters of heavy snow, 1981 and 1988, broke off major branches and visibly reduced this horse chestnut's crown, and it has not fully recovered since. What survives is one of Japan's largest tochinoki, hollow through much of its trunk, unusually smooth-barked for a species that typically knots heavily with age. The girth runs about 11.8 metres at the widest point near the ground, narrowing to 9.7 metres measured 1.5 metres up, in the Wakidani hollow of Toga, a mountain district of Nanto City in Toyama Prefecture. Japan designated it a National Natural Monument on 20 October 1926. Its age carries a real disagreement worth stating plainly. Local tradition puts it at roughly 1,000 years; the more recent scientific estimate is closer to 800. Neither is a ring count, so both are estimates rather than measurements, and this page uses the more conservative figure. No health survey since 2020 turned up in searching, so its current condition is not fully known. What is documented is a tree that has lost real mass to weather and kept standing anyway: hollow, hardly pristine, still there. It is free to see, in rural mountain country roughly an hour by car from the Tonami Interchange on the Hokuriku Expressway.