Nakakamado Weeping Maple

A Maple That Grows the Wrong Way

On June 15, 1937, the Japanese government placed a single pair of ornamental maples under legal protection as a Natural Monument. The trees grow in the grounds of a small Kannon hall in Nakakamado, a quiet farming hamlet in the Watanabe district near the southern edge of present-day Iwaki City, Fukushima Prefecture.

What earned the designation was not the trees' age, which remains unknown, nor their height. It was the way the branches grow. Instead of reaching upward in the usual fashion of a maple, they curl outward and bend toward the ground, spreading into a low, rounded canopy that resembles an open umbrella. Botanists regard this weeping habit as a spontaneous mutation. The trees are, in effect, a natural experiment that has stood in one spot for generations.

There are two of them, growing close together: a large tree and a smaller companion, both showing the same drooping form. Local people call them simply the Nakakamado no Shidare Momiji, the "weeping maple of Nakakamado."

From Garden Tree to Protected Monument

The trees belong to Acer palmatum, the Japanese maple known in Japanese as iroha-momiji. It is one of the most familiar trees in the country, planted in gardens and temple grounds everywhere and prized above all for its autumn color. A weeping form, however, is rare. Branches that bend downward rather than up do not appear in the normal growth of the species.

By the early twentieth century, students of botany had taken an interest in the Nakakamado maples precisely because of this abnormality. Japan's framework for protecting natural features had been established under a 1919 law covering scenic spots, historic sites, and natural monuments, and trees of unusual form were one recognized category. In 1937 the two maples were entered on the national register. That September, Iwaki City assumed formal responsibility for their care as the designated managing body.

The setting has changed little since. The trees stand beside a modest Kannon hall, a small Buddhist structure of the kind found throughout rural Japan, surrounded by the low hills and rice fields of a typical satoyama landscape: the managed countryside where village life and woodland meet.

Why This Tree Was Singled Out

Natural Monument status in Japan is reserved for animals, plants, and geological features judged to hold particular scientific or cultural value. Within the category of plants, the criteria cover notable trees, giant trees, ancient trees, and trees of irregular form. The Nakakamado maples were listed under the last of these.

The original 1937 record describes the larger tree in spare, formal language: a trunk roughly three meters around measured one meter above the ground, with branches that twist and bend to form an umbrella shape. It identifies the tree as a weeping variant of mountain maple and notes its value for the study of plant form.

That last point is the heart of the designation. A tree whose growth departs sharply from the species norm offers researchers a living case study. The weeping habit raises questions that interest both morphologists, who study plant structure, and geneticists, who study how such traits arise and are passed on. The Nakakamado maples are valued less as a spectacle than as evidence.

What to Look For

Visitors who arrive expecting a towering forest giant will find something different, and in its way more curious.

The larger of the two trees stands about 6.8 meters tall, with a trunk measuring roughly 3.5 meters around at chest height and a root spread of about 2.75 meters. The smaller tree reaches some 4 meters, its trunk well under a meter in girth. Neither is enormous. What holds the eye is form rather than scale.

The trunks are pale and conspicuously twisted, almost sculptural, with rounded burls swelling at intervals along their length. From these contorted stems the branches fan outward and droop, some local accounts putting the east-west spread of the crown at close to ten meters. The overall effect is of a great green parasol resting on a gnarled base.

Autumn is when most people come. The foliage turns from late November into early December, shifting through orange to a deep red. The timing runs slightly later than the maple color in many parts of Japan, a useful detail for travelers chasing the season. Through November, Iwaki City posts regular photographs of the changing color on its website, which makes it possible to judge the right moment before setting out.

Outside the autumn weeks the trees are quieter company, bare in winter and green through summer. Without the leaves, the strange architecture of the branches is in some ways easier to read.

Around Nakakamado

The hamlet of Nakakamado lies inland from the coast in the southern part of Iwaki, a large city formed in 1966 from the merger of fourteen towns and villages. The maples are a roadside discovery rather than a headline attraction, and reaching them takes a little planning.

By car, the trees are about ten minutes from Izumi Station on the JR Joban Line, and roughly twenty minutes from the Iwaki-Yumoto interchange on the Joban Expressway. The lanes immediately around the site are narrow and pass close to private homes. The city asks visitors to use the designated viewing parking lot, which holds nine cars and sits about a ten-minute walk away; tour buses are directed to wait at the Nakakamado community hall. There are no permanent toilets at the tree, though a temporary one is set up at the parking lot during the autumn season.

The wider Iwaki area rewards a longer stay. The Shiramizu Amidado, a Buddhist hall built in the late Heian period and the only structure in Fukushima Prefecture designated a National Treasure, lies within easy reach and is itself ringed by maples and ginkgo that color in autumn. Toward the coast at Onahama, the Aquamarine Fukushima aquarium presents the marine life of the cold and warm currents that meet off this shore. Iwaki Yumoto, one of the older hot spring districts in eastern Japan, offers a place to soak at the end of the day, and the nearby Spa Resort Hawaiians draws families to its indoor pools and Polynesian shows.