A Cycad the Size of a House in an Izu Hot-Spring Town
The Great Sago Palm of Shinmachi grows beside a quiet stretch of prefectural road in the Mine district of Kawazu, a hot-spring town near the southeastern tip of the Izu Peninsula. A low hedge half-conceals it from the street, and first-time visitors sometimes walk past before they notice the dark, glossy fronds rising above the fence line.
The name "sago palm" is misleading. This is not a palm at all. It is a cycad, Cycas revoluta, a gymnosperm whose family reaches back to the age of the dinosaurs. Botanists call cycads living fossils for good reason: the group flourished long before flowering plants existed and has changed remarkably little since. The Japanese name for the plant, sotetsu, is written with characters meaning "revive" and "iron," from an old belief that a sickly specimen regains its strength when iron is worked into the soil around its roots.
What makes this plant worth a detour is its scale. The species is native to southern Kyushu and the Ryukyu Islands, where it usually stays low and bushy. This one became a giant. Its central trunk climbs to about 10 meters, a height almost unheard of in the species. The root base spans roughly 2.5 meters, and from it several heavy secondary trunks spread outward and trail across the ground, bending and coiling in shapes that local visitors have long likened to a knot of large snakes.
One of a Small Handful of Protected Cycads
The plant was designated a National Natural Monument on September 3, 1936, under the criterion that covers notable, ancient, and unusually formed trees. Cycads rarely receive this protection. Across the whole of Japan only twelve cycad-related sites carry the designation. Two of them are wild colonies in Miyazaki and Kagoshima, protected as Special Natural Monuments because they mark the northern edge of the species' natural range. The remaining ten are individual cultivated plants, and three of those ten stand within Shizuoka Prefecture. The Shinmachi cycad is the most striking of the three.
The survey carried out for the 1936 designation recorded the plant arm by arm. Where the central trunk leaves the ground it measured 2.2 meters around. The eastern arm measured 2.0 meters, the southern 1.0 meter, the northern 0.9 meter, and the western 0.6 meter. Taken together, the whole clump came to 7.76 meters in circumference. Those figures are worth keeping in mind on a visit, because the tree's spreading habit makes its true bulk hard to judge by eye.
The cycad is a female plant. Cycads are dioecious, meaning individual plants are either male or female, and this one sets seed in alternate years. When the seeds appear, they cluster in a ring at the crown of the central trunk.
A Tree Tied to the Tokugawa Story
The "Shinmachi" of the name is not a place. It is the house name of the Masaki family, who served for generations as village headmen in Mine and on whose grounds the cycad has always grown. The natural monument therefore carries the name of a household rather than a location.
That household has an unexpected place in national history. An ancestor of the family, Masaki Yoritada, had a daughter who became Lady Oman, known after she took religious vows as Yojuin. She entered the service of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the Tokugawa shogunate, as one of his consorts. The family holds that this house was her birthplace, and that the cycad was already a substantial tree when she was born in the sixteenth century. A well associated with Lady Oman still stands a short walk from the trunk.
How old the plant really is remains an open question. The Kawazu tourism association puts the age at more than 600 years; other accounts suggest 800 years or even a full millennium. Cycads grow slowly and resist precise dating, so the range is best treated as informed estimate rather than fact.
The tree has not had an untroubled life. During the Taisho era a fire scorched the eastern side of the clump, though the plant recovered well enough to be judged worthy of national protection two decades later. In June 1981 it received a notable visitor when Emperor Showa and Empress Kojun stopped to view it. Its vigor has flagged somewhat in recent years, and the longer arms are now held up by wooden props placed to keep them from breaking under their own weight. The props are part of the sight. They show a town actively tending a tree it counts among its treasures.
Stand at the hedge and look for the contrast between the upright central trunk and the low, wandering arms. The upright growth is what a healthy cycad does. The long horizontal trunks are the slow work of centuries, and they are the reason this plant resembles nothing else.
Around the Sago Palm
The cycad sits in the Mine area of Kawazu, midway between two of the town's best-known attractions, and it fits naturally into a half-day of walking.
A few minutes to the south lies the Kawazu River, lined with the cherry trees that made the town famous. The Kawazu cherry is an early-blooming variety, opening from early February into March, weeks ahead of the cherries elsewhere in Japan. The riverside rows draw large crowds during the annual blossom festival. The variety was first identified in Kawazu, which is why the town treats it as a local emblem.
A short distance north is Mine Onsen Daifunto Park, built around a hot-spring geyser that erupts on a fixed schedule several times a day, throwing boiling water high into the air. Mine Onsen is one of the seven hot springs of Kawazu, and the day-use bathhouse Odoriko Onsen Kaikan stands almost opposite the cycad, which makes it easy to combine a soak with the visit.
Kawazu has a second National Natural Monument tree as well: the great camphor at Sugihokowake-no-mikoto Shrine, an enormous evergreen of a completely different character. Seeing both in one trip gives a sense of the range of old trees this small town has managed to keep.
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Q&A
- When is the best time to visit?
- The cycad can be seen all year, and viewing is free. Many travelers time their trip to the Kawazu cherry season in February and early March, when the town is at its liveliest, though that is also when it is most crowded.
- How do I get there?
- From Kawazu Station on the Izukyu Line, take a Tokai Bus bound for Shuzenji and get off at the Odoriko Onsen Kaikan stop, a ride of about five minutes. The cycad stands right beside the stop. By car, it is a short drive from National Route 414.
- Is there an admission fee?
- No. Viewing is free today, although a small fee was charged in the past.
- Can I touch the tree or walk around it?
- The cycad is enclosed and viewed from outside the hedge. The wooden props supporting its arms are there to protect an aging plant, so admiring it from the marked area is both expected and appreciated.
- What is the difference between a sago palm and a real palm?
- Despite the shared name and a similar crown of fronds, the two are unrelated. Palms are flowering plants. The sago palm is a cycad, a far older group of seed plants that reproduces with cones rather than flowers, and one of the few seed plants whose fertilization involves swimming sperm cells.
Basic Information
| Name | The Great Sago Palm of Shinmachi (Shinmachi no Osotetsu) |
|---|---|
| Location | Mine, Kawazu, Kamo District, Shizuoka Prefecture |
| Designation | National Natural Monument |
| Date of designation | September 3, 1936 |
| Species | Japanese sago palm (Cycas revoluta) |
| Dimensions | Central trunk approx. 10 m tall; root base approx. 2.5 m across; clump circumference 7.76 m (1936 survey) |
| Estimated age | More than 600 years (estimates vary; some sources suggest 800 to 1,000 years) |
| Site | Grounds historically held by the Masaki family; the surrounding area is maintained by the town of Kawazu |
| Access | About 5 min by Tokai Bus from Kawazu Station (Izukyu Line) to the Odoriko Onsen Kaikan stop |
| Admission | Free |
References
- Shinmachi no Osotetsu - Database of National Cultural Properties, Agency for Cultural Affairs
- https://kunishitei.bunka.go.jp/bsys/maindetails/401/1343
- Shinmachi no Osotetsu - Cultural Heritage Online
- https://bunka.nii.ac.jp/heritages/detail/172175
- Shinmachi no Osotetsu - Izu Kawazu Town Tourism Association
- https://www.kawazu-onsen.com/sightseeing/21
- Shinmachi no Osotetsu - Wikipedia (Japanese)
- https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/新町の大ソテツ
Last verified: 2026.05.25