Kyu-Hosokawa-tei no Shii

Eight metres around and barely eleven tall, this chinquapin is built like a barrel. The Tokyo Board of Education's plaque gives it a girth of 8.13 metres against a height of 10.8, which is the shape a tree takes when it spends centuries widening instead of climbing. It grows a minute from the ticket gates of Shirokanetakanawa Station, inside the grounds of a Minato ward community plaza, and most people walk past it. The ground under it is darker than the setting suggests. This was the lower residence of the Hosokawa lords of Kumamoto, and after the Ako Incident of 1701 it was here that Oishi Kuranosuke and sixteen other Ako retainers were held in shogunate custody until they were ordered to commit seppuku. A monument nearby still marks the spot. Whether the tree was standing then, nobody can say. TV Tokyo's 2025 segment on it repeats the local figure of roughly four hundred years or more, and there is no ring count, register entry or planting record to tighten that. If anyone has measured it properly, we would like to know. Tokyo lists it as a Natural Monument. Sudajii is an evergreen and does nothing dramatic in any month. It is simply very old, very wide, and still standing on the exact patch of ground where the Hosokawa mansion used to be, which is more than the mansion managed.