The Shiba Toshogu Ginkgo

A shogun planted this tree with his own hands, or so Shiba Toshogu has claimed for almost four centuries. In 1641, Tokugawa Iemitsu, the third Tokugawa shogun, is said to have planted this ginkgo himself at the shrine built to deify his grandfather Ieyasu. It has been designated a Tokyo Natural Monument ever since records began keeping track, one of the city's officially protected trees. The shrine originally sat inside the vast precinct of Zojoji temple next door, the Tokugawa family's own funerary temple, until the Meiji government's forced separation of Buddhist and Shinto sites in the 1870s split them into two addresses. Zojoji's main hall was destroyed in the 1945 air raids that leveled most of Shiba; the shrine's smaller buildings burned too. The ginkgo, planted by the man whose family the whole complex was built to honor, came through the fires that took the buildings around it. Today it stands about 21 meters tall in front of the shrine's gate, with Tokyo Tower rising directly behind it, a 1930s landmark now photographed constantly by tourists aiming their cameras at the newer one instead.