The Great Hinoki Cypress of Okubo

A Cypress That Outgrew Its Hamlet

The Great Hinoki of Ōkubo stands on a mountainside roughly 700 metres above sea level, at the back of a hamlet of only a few houses in Shiiba Village, Miyazaki Prefecture. It is a single Japanese cypress, the species known in Japan as hinoki (Chamaecyparis obtusa), and it reaches 32 metres in height. Around its base the trunk measures 9.3 metres. About one metre above the ground the main stem breaks apart into a crowd of heavy secondary trunks, and the crown they form spreads 32 metres from east to west and 30 metres from north to south.

The Agency for Cultural Affairs registered the tree as a National Natural Monument on 2 March 1994. Most visitors reach it after a short uphill walk from a small parking area, and the first sight of it tends to stop conversation.

Eight Centuries on One Spot

A signboard placed by the Shiiba Village Board of Education gives the tree an estimated age of about 800 years. The figure is a local estimate rather than a measured fact, but even a cautious reading puts its first growth somewhere in Japan's medieval centuries, long before the hamlet around it took its present shape.

Hinoki rarely live to such an age in modern Japan. The species is grown almost everywhere as timber, and plantation trees are usually felled at 40 to 60 years. A cypress allowed to stand for eight centuries is therefore a genuine rarity, and the people of Ōkubo have a reason for letting this one stand.

According to residents, the cypress marks the resting place of the ancestor who first cleared and settled Ōkubo. Local belief holds it to be a gentle tree, the grave marker of a woman, and the hamlet has tended it as an ancestral monument ever since.

One story passed down in Ōkubo explains why no one treats the tree carelessly. A woman returning from a day's work in the mountains tucked a smouldering ember into a gap in the cypress's bark, meaning to collect it the following day. That night her eyes began to hurt so badly that she sought out a local diviner, who told her she must have done something to the hinoki. She went back and found that the ember she believed she had put out was still alight, and the bark was burning. The ancestral tree, people said, had sent word. Older residents recalled that the scorch mark stayed visible into their own childhoods.

The Tallest of Its Kind

Hinoki is a conifer found only in Japan, and it carries particular weight in Japanese building and woodcraft. Giant specimens, however, are far less common than giant sugi (Japanese cedar), which accounts for most of the country's protected great trees. A hinoki large enough to warrant national protection is unusual in itself.

The Ōkubo cypress earned its designation on measurable grounds. In the records of the Agency for Cultural Affairs it is listed as the tallest hinoki in Japan and third largest by trunk circumference. Those rankings, together with the tree's age and condition, led the agency to judge its academic value high enough for protection as a Natural Monument under the criterion that covers notable and giant trees.

What to Look For

Anyone expecting the clean vertical line of a plantation cypress will find something else here. A few metres up, the trunk gives way to a crowd of branches that bend sharply, twist, and then drive upward again toward the canopy. The effect is closer to wild than to tidy, and writers who have visited often reach for words like fierce or strange before they reach for beautiful.

A path circles the base, so the tree can be read from every side. Each angle changes it. Stand back and the crown looks like a single broad dome. Step beneath it and the structure resolves into dozens of separate stems, each thick enough to be a sizeable tree on its own. Looking straight up the trunk is worth the crick in the neck.

The hamlet sits high and quiet, and the clearing around the cypress holds that quiet well. Visitors tend to linger longer than they planned.

Getting There and Nearby Sights

Shiiba Village lies deep in the mountains of northern Miyazaki and is often counted among Japan's remaining secluded regions. The cypress is about 25 minutes by car from the village office. The drive in follows National Route 265 and then a narrow mountain road; from Kumamoto the trip takes roughly two and a half hours, and from Miyazaki City around three and a half.

The parking area sits on private land belonging to a hamlet household and includes a toilet. From there it is a walk of five to ten minutes to the tree. Because the lot and the approach pass close to people's homes, evening visits are discouraged out of consideration for residents.

The same valley holds several other reasons to make the journey. About ten minutes away by car stands the Yamura-sugi, a giant Japanese cedar that is also a National Natural Monument, beside Tonegawa Shrine. The nearby Tonegawa settlement is a nationally designated Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, its old houses set along the slope. Taken together, the cypress, the cedar, and the village add up to something close to an open-air museum of mountain life.