Enkiri Enoki — the Bond-Severing Hackberry
縁切榎（板橋宿） · Enkiri Enoki — the Bond-Severing Hackberry
- Ward
- Itabashi
- Price
- Free (votive tablet with charm, 1,000 yen)
- Hours
- Always open (votive-tablet ven
- Closed
- None
- Getting there
- 5 min from Itabashi-honcho Station (Toei Mita Line)
- The votive tablets come from a vending machine
- A shogun's bride had a detour built to avoid it
- Do not scrape the bark — that is how the first two were lost
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Obvious to locals, invisible to visitors
There is a simple reason guidebooks leave this out: to the people who live here it is too obvious to be worth explaining.
There is no office and nobody to serve you: the votive tablets come out of a vending machine on the site, 1,000 yen with a charm, sold between six in the morning and nine at night. Turn up later and you can pray, but you cannot write.
In 1861, when Princess Kazunomiya went down to marry the fourteenth shogun, passing this tree was thought unlucky, so a detour was built in advance and the procession took it into the Itabashi post station. Another account says the tree was wrapped in matting and the party passed beneath; the records support the detour.
People once believed that bark steeped in tea or sake would grant a wish, and visitors shaved pieces away. The second tree dwindled until it had to be set in concrete, with a sign asking that it not be cut. What is left of the first fits in the palm of a hand and is kept inside the small shrine.
What it is
A small shrine tucked into the Nakajuku shopping street on the old Nakasendo highway. In the Edo period an enoki (hackberry) and a tsuki (zelkova) stood together in a hatamoto's estate here; read together the names sound like 'the bond runs out', and the spot became a place for severing ties. The present tree is the third, and it now stands on the opposite side of the road.
What to order
Why locals keep coming
In 1861, when Princess Kazunomiya travelled down to marry the fourteenth shogun, her procession is said to have taken a specially built detour rather than pass this ill-omened tree. Today it is understood as a place that cuts bad ties while making good ones, and pilgrims come from across Japan. In earlier times people prayed here to break a drinking habit as often as a marriage.