Janelle’s Reviews > Tree > Status Update

I ended up meeting three trees: a pine in the grounds of a temple in Edogawa, Tokyo; a camphor in a paddyeld in Yokkaichi; and a sugi in a eld along the roadside in Fukushima. If something connected them it was that each tree was huge, and stood alone.

Jindai- zakura, as the tree is known, is of the Edohigan variety. I was extremely fortunate, happening to go right on the day when it was in full bloom. The tree was enormous, and you could tell by looking that it was old–as you might anticipate for something named Jindai, or ‘age of the gods’.

Some of the cedars on Yakushima are given the name Yakusugi, ………. This name is reserved for sugi trees over a thousand years old, whilst those under a thousand are known as ‘little cedars’. Quite a high bar when you think about it: a thousand years as the boundary between a Yakusugi and a little cedar. I could hear the reverence for the Yakusugi in their name and the way people spoke about them,