The Child-Rearing Ginkgo of Zoshigaya Kishimojin

Edo-period women came here to put their arms around this trunk, and people still do. The tree is the kosodate icho, the child-rearing ginkgo, and it stands beside the Kishimojin hall in Zoshigaya, dedicated to a deity of safe childbirth; the tradition holds that a woman who embraces the trunk will be blessed with children. The scale stands up on its own too. At 32.5 metres it is the second-largest ginkgo in Tokyo, after the Zenpukuji tree in Motoazabu. Its girth is less settled. Toshima Ward's own cultural-affairs page, the authority that designates it, gives 6.63 metres, while a separate summary citing the metropolitan heritage map gives 11, and nearly double is too large a gap to split: it may be that one figure takes in the buttressed root mass and the other the trunk, or that a number was copied wrong. The ward's figure is the one we carry. The ward also records the planting: by the monk Nichiyu in the Oei era, between 1394 and 1428, which puts the tree here a century and a half before the hall beside it, built around 1578. Its paperwork has had a rougher time than it has. Made a national Natural Monument in 1933, the designation was revoked in 1946, and Tokyo redesignated it at metropolitan level in 1956. Reach it by the old sweet-shop lane.