Atago Jinja

As with Izanagi Jinja, this Atago Jinja is probably best known for having a tree, in this case two trees, designated by Ichikawa City as municipal natural monuments. They are two large ginko (maidenhair) trees over 20 metres high and over 5.4 metres in circumference. Their age is unknown, but it is thought that they may have been planted when the shrine was built, about 350 years ago. While there are four or five other such large ginko trees in the city, none of them are as close to each other, just 1.7 metres apart, as these two are. They stand at the entrance to the shrines’s approach road, which is over 100 metres long and bisects a residential area.

Although there are other large trees in the shrine grounds what really caught my eye there was a pair of what I can only describe as almost winsome komainu.