Published ages for Jomon Sugi run from 1,300 years to 7,200, and not one of them is a measurement. The tree is hollow where its oldest wood should be, so no core has ever reached the centre and every figure ever printed is an extrapolation. What can be measured is the body: 16.4 metres around, the largest Japanese cedar known, standing in the World Heritage core zone of an island off southern Kyushu. Reaching it is a nine to ten hour mountain day, and you view it from a deck ten metres off.
0 of 2 visited in Yakushima
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · 2000-3600 years · Yakushima wilderness / Arakawa trail
Published ages for this cedar run from about 1,300 years to 7,200, and not one of them is a measurement. Yakusugi rot from the inside out, so this trunk is hollow where its oldest wood should be, and no core sample has ever reached the pith. Every figure ever printed about its age is an extrapolation from the outer rings inward. The Ministry of the Environment's official line is over 2,600 years. The 7,200 came out of early coring attempts and is largely discarded now. The honest answer is that nobody knows, and that is the most interesting thing about it.
What can be measured is the body: 16.4 metres around at chest height, 25.3 metres tall, the largest yakusugi known. It was only found in 1966, by a postal worker, and named for the Jomon period on the strength of an age nobody could confirm. It sits in the World Heritage core zone on Yakushima and forms part of a Special Natural Monument.
Two things to know before you go. You cannot get near it. Visitors stand on a wooden deck about ten metres off and see it from three sides, because feet on the root plate were doing real damage.
And this is a full mountain day, not a walk. The round trip from the Arakawa trailhead runs nine to ten hours, most of it along an old logging tramway. March to November the road is shut to cars and the pre-dawn shuttle must be booked ahead.
Japanese Cedar (Cryptomeria japonica) · 3,000 years · Yakushima interior forest (Miyanoura)
For a while this was the largest cedar anybody knew of on Yakushima. Then Jomon Sugi was found and named, and the Daio-sugi dropped to second, which is not a demotion you feel standing under it. Japan's Ministry of the Environment measures it at 11.1 metres around at chest height and 24.7 metres tall, on a slope roughly 1,200 metres up in the island's interior forest. That is a trunk about the width of a small room.
The same ministry gives its age as more than 3,000 years. That is the government's own broad estimate rather than a ring count, and the phrasing matters: it is a floor, not a ceiling. A cedar standing here that long was already old before anything about Japan was written down.
Getting there is the price and most of the point. The tree stands directly on the marked trail to Jomon Sugi, inside a World Heritage core zone, about four hours from the Arakawa trailhead along an old logging tram road and another forty-five minutes up the Ooyama Trail. Private cars cannot reach the trailhead in the busy season, so the day starts with a booked shuttle bus. Then you walk.
Nothing is fenced and nothing is charged. The trail simply passes it, signed, after four hours in which everything else has also been a cedar and none of them has been this one.