Kuchioya no O-Abemaki

There is no shrine here, no gate and no hall. The tree is the sacred object itself. Kuchioya no O-Abemaki grows on a mountainside behind a former school in Naka, in Oya, and the district has long treated it as a dwelling place of the gods rather than as decoration around a building. It is an abemaki, the oriental cork oak, a species whose bark thickens into deep corky ridges and which in Japan almost never reaches this size. The national register, which made it a Natural Monument on 9 June 1951, records 5.6 metres round, about 16 metres tall and an age near 400 years. Yabu's own tourism association publishes the same three figures and calls it a rare giant of its kind. Four centuries is long enough to outlast the institutions that grow up beneath a tree. The school it stands behind is a former school now. The oak is still there. Go prepared to walk uphill without help. There is no marked path and no confirmed parking, and nobody has put a fence or a fee between you and it. The tourism board lists it as a going concern; if you get there and find otherwise, tell us. It is 800 metres from Tarumi-no-Ozakura, which makes the pair of them one stop rather than two.