The Senbon Ginkgo of Katsushika Hachimangu

Lightning split this ginkgo about six metres up, and the tree answered by pushing a crowd of new trunks out of its own base. Enough of them that the shrine calls it Senbon Icho, the thousand-trunk ginkgo, and enough that it is now fatter at chest height than at the ground: 10.8 metres round against 10.2 at the roots. It stands 22 metres tall. Katsushika Hachimangu, whose sacred tree it is, was founded in the Heian period, and both the shrine and the city of Ichikawa put the ginkgo at about 1,200 years, a round traditional figure rather than a planting date anyone wrote down. Japan made it a National Natural Monument on 20 February 1931, the first such designation anywhere in what is now Ichikawa. A white snake is said to live in the tree, and seeing it is supposed to bring happiness and long life. Mothers once scraped a breast-shaped swelling on the trunk hoping for milk, a habit the monument status put a stop to. It is not, strictly, a Tokyo tree. The shrine stands in Ichikawa, Chiba, across the Edogawa river, six minutes and one stop down the Sobu Line from Koiwa and a short walk from Motoyawata station. Go in late November, when the shrine lights it up and the whole many-trunked thing turns gold.