Overview: The Mystery of the Striped Acorns
Most travelers come home from Japan with photographs of temples, sushi, and Mount Fuji. We come home with those too, but also an inordinate number of photos of plants, trees, and, on this trip, striped acorns.
The acorns became a minor obsession during our stay in Hiroshima. It started with noticing acorns scattered on the ground beneath trees. Were these oak trees? Did Japan have the same kinds of oaks we were familiar with? Then we started spotting acorns still attached to branches, some with distinctive longitudinal stripes. We were intrigued. After several days of looking up at trees and down at the ground, we finally identified them as Japanese blue oak (Quercus glauca). Confirmation came from a botanical sign near a shrine on Mount Futaba in Hiroshima. Mystery solved, though perhaps not one that needed several days of our vacation devoted to it.
Throughout our three weeks in Japan, we photographed plants and trees along city streets, in gardens, around homes, and pm temple and shrine grounds. Gradually, we realized that trees were becoming one of the recurring themes of the trip. Some caught our attention because of their unfamiliar shapes or species, others because of the elaborate structures supporting their branches. And in Hiroshima, we encountered trees whose stories went well beyond botany.
This post is about some of those trees and the things we learned by stopping to look at them. Our Japan 2026 trip took us from Kanazawa to Amanohashidate to Osaka to Hiroshima to Tokyo. Also see the post
Japan 2026 – Another Salute to the People We Saw.
Trees in the Japanese Landscape
In our
2025 post about temples, shrines, gardens, and the connection to nature in Japan, we wrote about the importance of green spaces in Japanese cities and how gardens and temple grounds offer a welcome respite from the surrounding urban environment. On this second trip, we found ourselves paying more attention to the trees themselves, especially their shapes, their placement in the landscape, and the care given to them.
We came away with the impression that trees in Japan are often treated as more than background greenery. They are incorporated into streetscapes, carefully pruned in gardens, and sometimes given prominent positions in temple and shrine grounds. Of course, not every tree gets special treatment, but we saw enough examples to make us wonder about the relationship between trees and the people who live among them.
The ginkgo trees (Ginkgo biloba) lining the boulevard where we stayed in Chiyoda City, Tokyo, made an impression on us during both our 2025 and 2026 visits. Tall, straight, and neatly trimmed, they stood like sentinels along the street. Their distinctive fan-shaped leaves are beautiful, especially as they turn yellow in autumn.
Their beauty comes with a rather unpleasant footnote. Have you ever smelled fallen ginkgo fruit decomposing on a sidewalk? The odor is remarkably similar to vomit, thanks in part to butyric acid, a compound also found in rancid butter and, yes, vomit. A reminder that even majestic trees have their less appealing qualities.
Fortunately, the seeds inside the fruit are another matter. At an izakaya in Hiroshima, we ate roasted ginkgo nuts, peeled from their shells and dipped in a little salt. Delicious. It's an odd botanical progression: admire the tree, avoid what's fallen from it, and then order part of it for dinner.
The Art of Keeping a Tree
Early in our trip, we were awed by the trees in
Kenrokuen Garden in Kanazawa, considered one of Japan's three great gardens. Some of the pines are enormous, with thick, twisting trunks and branches extending horizontally for remarkable distances. These are not trees left entirely to their own devices. They have been cultivated, shaped, supported, and preserved over generations.
What particularly caught our attention were the wooden supports placed beneath some of the enormous branches. In places, the supports are so elaborate that they become architectural features in their own right. Upright wooden posts prop up branches that might otherwise break under their own weight. The result is a curious collaboration between tree and gardener: the tree grows, the gardener intervenes, and over time the two produce something neither could have created alone.
Kenrokuen is also famous for its yukitsuri, the conical arrangements of ropes suspended from tall poles to protect branches from heavy winter snow. The permanent wooden supports were fascinating enough for us. They made us think about the amount of attention required to keep an old tree looking the way it does. What appears natural and effortless is sometimes the result of considerable human effort.
Later, at Amanohashidate, we encountered pines in a very different setting. Thousands of them grow along the narrow sandbar stretching across Miyazu Bay, creating a green corridor between the water on either side. Walking beneath them, we were struck by how the trees define the place. Without the pines, Amanohashidate would still be an unusual geographical formation, but it would be a very different landscape.
Along the sandbar, we encountered several signs explaining the ongoing efforts to preserve the pine forest. One of the problems, somewhat counterintuitively, is that the soil can become too rich. Pines do well in sandy, nutrient-poor soils. As fallen leaves and other organic matter accumulate and decompose into humus, the enriched soil favors deciduous and other broadleaf trees, which gradually compete with and displace the pines. To maintain the forest, workers actively remove humus, undergrowth, and some competing trees.
We found this fascinating. Normally, we think of rich soil as a good thing. At Amanohashidate, too much of it threatens the very trees that make the landscape famous. Historically, people collected fallen pine needles and branches for fuel, which had the unintended benefit of keeping the soil relatively poor. Today, deliberate conservation work helps maintain those conditions.
The contrast between Kenrokuen and Amanohashidate is interesting. In one place, gardeners support and shape individual trees; in the other, they manage the soil and competing vegetation to preserve an entire pine forest. Both landscapes appear natural, even timeless, but maintaining them requires continuous human intervention.
Keeping a tree, it turns out, isn't always a matter of simply leaving it alone.
Trees That Survived
In Hiroshima, we continued photographing trees, as we had throughout the trip. But here, the small signs attached to some of them changed what we were looking at. These were
hibakujumoku (被爆樹木), trees that survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945.
The signs identify the species and the distance of each tree from the hypocenter, the point on the ground directly beneath the explosion. Hiroshima is a city where distances from the hypocenter are often noted. The atomic bomb detonated approximately 600 meters above the city, and knowing how far something stood from that point helps make sense of the geography of the destruction.
Near Hiroshima Castle, for example, a eucalyptus tree survived just 740 meters from the hypocenter. Photographs taken after the bombing show the tree badly burned. It survived, only to have part of its trunk broken off by a typhoon in 1971. Yet it continued growing. Nearby, a willow also survived at the same distance. Elsewhere in the city, a weeping willow survived at 1,700 meters, near Tsurumi Bridge.
We found ourselves paying attention to these distances. Seven hundred and forty meters is not far. Even 1,700 meters seems remarkably close when considering the force of the explosion. Yet these trees survived, and 81 years later, they are still growing in a city that has been almost entirely rebuilt around them.
At Hijiyama Park, where we visited the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, we walked through lush, wooded paths, occasionally trying to orient ourselves in relation to the hypocenter. The park is a beautiful green space today, but it's difficult to walk around Hiroshima without thinking about what happened there. History has a way of entering even the most ordinary parts of a visit.
During our time in Hiroshima, we also visited the Peace Memorial Museum. One of the things that makes the museum so affecting is how it moves from the enormous scale of the destruction to individual objects and individual lives. A piece of clothing, a lunchbox, a photograph. The objects make the events of that morning more comprehensible, and more disturbing.
The survivor trees affected us in a similar way. The destruction of an entire city is difficult to imagine. But here was a living organism that occupied this piece of ground on the morning of August 6, 1945, and was still here in October 2026. Unlike a building rebuilt or a memorial erected afterward, the tree had been there all along.
We had started the trip admiring trees for their shapes, their unfamiliar species, and the care taken to preserve them. In Hiroshima, we found ourselves looking at trees for an entirely different reason.
Trees as Witnesses
We started our trip taking photographs of plants in general, but looking back through our photos, we realized how often we had gravitated toward trees. The carefully supported pines in Kenrokuen Garden, the thousands of pines along the Amanohashidate sandbar, the Japanese blue oaks and survivor trees in Hiroshima, and the stately ginkgoes lining the streets of Tokyo. Each had caught our attention for a different reason.
The survivor trees in Hiroshima brought home something that applies, in a less dramatic way, to all old trees. They are witnesses to the places around them and to the changes that take place over time. Some have been deliberately shaped and preserved, while others have simply continued growing as the human environment around them changed.
We tend to think of trees as part of the scenery, the greenery surrounding a shrine, temple, street, castle, or garden. But sometimes a tree has been standing there longer than much of what surrounds it. Buildings are replaced, streets are widened, gardens are redesigned, and generations of people come and go. The trees, if they're fortunate, remain.
Perhaps that's something we'll carry into our next trip to Japan: a greater curiosity about the trees we pass. Though, judging by the number of photographs we took of striped acorns, we're probably already paying them more attention than strictly necessary.
The plants and trees shown:
- A ginkgo in Harajuku Tokyo
- A Japanese Black Pine - Pinus thunbergii on the Amanohashidate sandbar
- A Japanese Black Pine - Pinus thunbergii
- Camphor tree near Atomic Bomb Dome in Hiroshima
- Castanopsis cuspidata var. sieboldii - chinquapin
- Couple Camphor at Sumiyoshi Shrine in Osaka
- Crataegus pinnatifida - Chinese Hawthorn, also known as Shanzha in Chinese or Sanzashi in Japanese
- Dichorisandra thyrsiflora - blue ginger - Kanazawa
- Dicranopteris linearis - Old World Forked Fern - Amanohashidate
- Eucalyptus melliodora - yellow ironbox. This tree survived the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima. It is approximately 740m from the hypocenter - Hiroshima
- Ginkgo trees in Kanda district
- Japanese white pine (likely Pinus parviflora) in the shape of a ship in front of Mukai Sake Brewery in Ine, Japan
- Lepisorus thunbergianus or nokishinobu, a common evergreen epiphyte fern
- Osmanthus fragrans - sweet osmanthus - has a beautiful smell in autumn
- Pinus densiflora - Japanese red pine, Korean red pine, Japanese pine - Kanazawa
- Quercus glauca - Japanese Blue Oak - stripes on acorns. Hiroshima
- Salix babylonica - Weeping willow. A tree that survived the atomic bomb blast in 1945. It is 1700m from the hypocenter - Hiroshima
- Shinobazu Pond - lotus - Tokyo
- Shinobazu Pond full of lotus plants - Tokyo
- Solanum mammosum - nipple fruit (inedible)
- Solidago canadensis - goldenrod - Kanazawa
- Staked pine - Kenrokuen Garden
- Staked pine in Kenrokuen Garden - Negari Pine
- Tree at the Chionji Temple Monjudo in Amanohashidate
- Yoshino cherry (Cerasus x yedoensis - Somei-yoshino) - 1800 m from hypocenter, survived atomic bomb
.JPG "Hiroshima Toshogu Shrine - two kids brought for a blessing by their parents (not pictured but nearby)")
.jpg "Side Stand Coffee - Hiroshima. Hipsters only at this cafe biker gear (leather jackets, etc.)")
%20making%20sure%20it%20gets%20off%20to%20a%20good%20start.JPG "Worker for the Shinkansen (bullet train) making sure it gets off to a good start")
%20in%20the%20shape%20of%20a%20ship%20in%20front%20of%20Mukai%20Sake%20Brewery%20in%20Ine,%20Japan.JPG "Japanese white pine (likely Pinus parviflora) in the shape of a ship in front of Mukai Sake Brewery in Ine, Japan")
.JPG "Solanum mammosun - nipple fruit (inedible)")
%20-%201800%20m%20from%20hypocenter,%20survived%20atomic%20bomb.JPG "Yoshino cherry (Cerasus x yedoensis - Somei-yoshino) - 1800 m from hypocenter, survived atomic bomb")