Cedar Avenue of Nikkō — remarkable tree
koh-etsu · Public domain

Cedar Avenue of Nikkō

  • 2 min read
  • 36.723° N 139.691° E

Interesting facts

  • The trees are owned not by the state but by Nikkō Tōshō-gū shrine, to which Matsudaira Masatsuna dedicated them in 1648.
  • According to tradition, other lords mocked Masatsuna for offering mere cedar saplings instead of a grand gift, and he replied that they should wait and see.
  • The surviving cedars stand about 30 to 40 metres tall, forming a continuous green tunnel over the old highways.
  • The avenue is steadily shrinking: a 1962 count found 16,479 trees, while by 2025 the number had fallen to about 12,000.
  • Since 1996 a sponsorship scheme has let companies and individuals become symbolic owners of individual trees, raising money for their protection.
  • One cedar in the Segawa area still bears damage from a cannonball fired during the Boshin War of 1868.
  • A tree known as the Namiki Hotel has a hollow base so large that about four people can shelter inside it.
  • A wild cherry once took root inside a split cedar trunk, and the resulting pair is known locally as the Cherry Cedar.
  • To protect the roots from traffic, stretches of the old roads were closed to vehicles in 2017 and 2018, with bypasses built alongside.
  • The avenue was first protected as a Historic Site in 1922 and later upgraded to both a Special Historic Site and a Special Natural Monument.

Why it is worth it

For more than 35 kilometres, the old roads into Nikkō run between walls of giant Japanese cedars, their straight red-brown trunks rising like columns on either side. The Cedar Avenue of Nikkō is the popular name for three tree-lined roads, the Nikkō Kaidō, the Nikkō Reiheishi Kaidō and the Aizu Nishi Kaidō, which converge on the shrines and temples of Nikkō. Together they are lined by roughly 12,500 to 13,000 cryptomeria trees, many of them close to 400 years old. The 1996 Guinness Book of World Records listed the avenue as the longest tree-lined road in the world, and it is the only property in Japan designated both a Special Historic Site and a Special Natural Monument.

The planting belongs to the age of the Tokugawa shoguns. Their road system was marked with distance mounds and shaded by rows of pine or cedar, and the routes to Nikkō mattered more than most, because Nikkō held the mausoleum of Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder of the shogunate, and later of his grandson Iemitsu, so shoguns and feudal lords travelled there on pilgrimage for generations. Around 1625 Matsudaira Masatsuna, lord of the Tamanawa domain in Sagami Province, began planting seedlings brought from Kii Province along the approaches. The avenue was formally dedicated to Ieyasu in 1648, on the 33rd anniversary of his death, the same year Masatsuna died. His son set up commemorative stones at four points and continued the work.

Estimates put the total planted over the years at some 200,000 trees. During the Edo period they were looked after by the magistrate in charge of the Nikkō shrines, but after the Meiji Restoration neglect and logging took a heavy toll. What survives now lines modern roads, including National Routes 119 and 121, so that traffic passes through the same green tunnel that once sheltered processions on their way to the shrines.

Getting there

The avenue runs through the city of Nikkō in Tochigi Prefecture; the nearest town centre is Imaichi, about 1 km away. Imaichi is served by JR Imaichi Station on the Nikkō Line and by Shimo-Imaichi Station on the Tōbu Nikkō Line. The nearest airport is Fukushima Airport (FKS), about 87 km away in a straight line across mountainous country.

Plan your visit

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Nearby places

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Tochigi Prefecture 7The Most Beautiful Places in Japan 122The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests in Japan 18The Most Remarkable Trees 19The Most Beautiful Gardens, Parks and Forests 232

From the encyclopaedia

The Cedar Avenue of Nikkō is the popular name for three separate tree-lined sections of roads in the city of Nikkō, Tochigi in the northern Kantō region of Japan. These roads are the Nikkō Kaidō, Nikkō Reiheishi Kaidō and Aizu Nishi Kaidō and the 13,000 cryptomeria trees lining a total of 35.41 kilometers (22.00 mi) of these roads form a monumental approach to the Shrines and Temples of Nikkō. Although it is not a single continuous road, the "Cedar Avenue of Nikkō" was listed in the 1996 Guinness Book of World Records as the longest tree-lined avenue in the world. It is the only cultural property designated by the Japanese Government as both a Special Historic Site and a Special Natural Monument.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

36.72291, 139.69082per Wikidata