Cycads at Matsuyaji Temple

The Great Cycad of Shōoku-ji: Japan's Most Famous Sago Palm

A single cycad fills the front garden of Shōoku-ji, a temple in the castle town of Hiji on the shore of Beppu Bay in Ōita Prefecture. From one base, more than a dozen woody trunks lean outward in different directions, each crowned with stiff, dark-green fronds. The plant rises to roughly six meters and spreads close to ten meters across the garden, large enough that visitors usually step back to take it in. Since the Edo period (1603–1868) it has been called the finest cycad in Japan, and in 1924 the national government recognized it as a Natural Monument.

The species is Cycas revoluta, known in Japanese as sotetsu. Despite its palm-like silhouette, it is not a palm at all. Cycads are gymnosperms, the same broad group that includes the ginkgo, and they reproduce through cones rather than flowers. Male and female cones grow on separate plants. The Shōoku-ji specimen is female, and in summer its growing point swells into a rounded, golden mass of seed-bearing structures rather than the elongated cone of a male plant.

A Castle Plant Carried Across the Bay

The cycad did not begin its life in Hiji. It was first grown at Funai Castle in present-day Ōita City, the seat of the lord who governed central Bungo Province. When that lord, Hineno Yoshiaki, died in 1656 without an heir, the castle passed temporarily into the care of neighboring domains. Kinoshita Toshiharu, second lord of the small Hiji domain, was assigned to oversee Funai Castle during the transition. On returning home in 1657, he is said to have carried the cycad back with him and planted it in the garden of his family temple.

That temple has its own story. It started as a hall called Saimyō-ji, and was reestablished in 1607 by Kinoshita Nobutoshi, the first lord of Hiji. He renamed it Shōoku-ji and combined two characters drawn from the Buddhist names of two women close to him: his grandmother, mother of the woman who became Toyotomi Hideyoshi's principal wife, and his own wife, Kaga. The temple became the burial ground of the Kinoshita line, and a cycad carried home from a neighboring castle suited a family that traced its standing to one of the most powerful figures of the late sixteenth century.

Because the plant was already mature when it was transplanted, its true age is hard to pin down. Local surveys estimate somewhere between 600 and 700 years, meaning it was likely a substantial plant long before it ever reached Hiji.

Why It Became a Natural Monument

Cycads grow wild in Japan only in the warm south, across southern Kyushu and the islands of Okinawa. They are slow growers. A specimen that reaches this size has survived for centuries of typhoons, frosts, and the ordinary risks of a garden plant. The 1924 designation placed it in the category for notable old and giant trees, the same legal protection given to ancient cryptomeria and camphor trees elsewhere in the country.

Measurements vary slightly between surveys, which is common for a multi-trunked plant with no single clear stem. Detailed records from the prefecture give a height of about 6.1 meters, a base circumference of around 6.4 meters measured a little above ground level, and a crown spreading roughly 9.7 meters north to south and 8.5 meters east to west. Whatever figure one uses, the scale is unusual for a plant of this kind growing this far north of its natural range.

What to Look for When You Visit

Stand at the front of the main hall and look at the base first. A cycad of this age does not grow as a single column. The original trunk has divided again and again, so that the plant now reads as a low thicket of trunks sharing one root system. Some lean almost horizontally before turning up toward the light, and the bark carries the diamond-patterned scars left by fronds shed over many decades.

If you come in summer, look at the center of the largest crowns for the rounded female cone structure, soft and woolly when young. The fronds themselves are worth a close look as well: each leaf is a long midrib lined with dozens of narrow, glossy leaflets that curl slightly at the edges, which is the feature that gives the species its name revoluta. In a hard winter the plant is sometimes wrapped in straw matting for protection, a traditional practice that itself is part of the seasonal rhythm of the temple grounds.

The Temple Grounds and the Town of Hiji

The cycad is only one reason to visit Shōoku-ji. The temple keeps a garden attributed to Sesshū, the renowned ink-painting master of the fifteenth century, who is said to have stayed here while training at Manju-ji in nearby Ōita. A treasure hall holds temple heirlooms, among them a painting of the Buddha's death scene and, more unusually, a tiger skull said to have come from an animal hunted by the warrior Katō Kiyomasa during the campaigns in Korea. Behind the main hall, the Kinoshita family cemetery holds 52 graves of successive lords, relatives, and retainers, a concentration of daimyo tombs rare within the prefecture.

The temple sits within easy walking distance of Hiji Castle, also known as Yōkoku Castle, built in 1602 by the same first lord who refounded Shōoku-ji. Only the stone walls, moat, and a reconstructed corner turret remain, with an elementary school now occupying the grounds, but the seafront ramparts give fine views over Beppu Bay. The waters just below the castle are famous for shiroshita-garei, a prized marbled sole that feeds where fresh spring water rises into the bay. Hiji was also the ancestral home of the family of Taki Rentarō, the young composer of the well-loved song "Kōjō no Tsuki," whose grave lies at another temple in the town.

Reaching the temple is straightforward. It is about a five-minute walk from Yōkoku Station on the JR Nippō Main Line, and parking is available for those arriving by car. Beppu's famous hot springs lie within a short drive, making Hiji an easy half-day stop on a wider trip through the region.