Daio-sugi (Yakushima)

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.