Yodohime Jinja

Yodohime Jinja.

In the rural countryside of Saga Prefecture, on the banks of the Kase River, sits a shrine that has watched over rice farmers for fourteen hundred years.

The shrine is famous, locally, for one of the largest camphor trees in Japan. Its trunk is fourteen hundred and fifty years old. Eleven meters around. So large that grown adults, holding hands, cannot encircle it. Its branches reach out so wide and heavy that they need wooden supports to keep from cracking under their own weight.

The tree is older than the shrine. Older than the village. Older than the river's current course.

Beside the tree, the river runs clear. The deity here is, in the old understanding, the spirit of water — specifically, the kind of water that supports rice farming. The Kase River, even today, irrigates the rice fields of central Saga, the same fields that have been worked, in some form, for over a thousand years.

The shrine itself is simple. White stone. Vermillion gate. A small main hall in the local style.

But the tree is the real reason people come.

Place your palm against the bark. Look up at the canopy.

Some places are sacred because of a building. Some places are sacred because, by accident or care, a single living thing has been allowed to keep growing for one thousand four hundred and fifty years.

The trees are older than us. The trees, when we let them, will outlast us.