The Sensoji War Ginkgo

This ginkgo used to be a national treasure and technically is not one anymore, and the reason why says everything about it. Legend holds that a branch stuck in the ground here by the shogun Minamoto no Yoritomo, visiting around 1189, took root and grew into this tree, which would make it roughly 800 years old. The Japanese government designated it a Natural Monument in 1930. Then, on the night of March 10, 1945, American firebombs burned nearly all of Asakusa to the ground, including Sensoji's main hall and its five-story pagoda, both later rebuilt from scratch. The ginkgo was hit directly. Its trunk is still hollow and blackened five or six meters up, a permanent scorch mark from a night that killed roughly 100,000 people in Tokyo. The fire damage was severe enough that the monument designation was revoked after the war. The tree itself was not deterred: it kept growing, and it is the one part of Sensoji that watched the temple burn and rebuild around it rather than the other way around.