Cleyera japonica (sakaki) is a flowering evergreen tree native to warm areas of Japan, Taiwan, China, Myanmar, Nepal, and northern India (Min and Bartholomew 2015).

It can reach a height of 10 m. The leaves are 6–10 cm long, smooth, oval, leathery, shiny and dark green above, yellowish-green below, with deep furrows for the leaf stem.

The small, scented, cream-white flowers open in early summer, and are followed later by berries which start red and turn black when ripe.

Shinto shrines are traditionally encircled with shinboku (神木, "sacred trees") constituting a himorogi (神籬, "divine fence").

In Shinto ritual offerings to the "gods; spirits" (神, kami), branches of sakaki are decorated with paper streamers (shide) to make tamagushi.

The lexicographer Michael Carr notes: In modern Japanese, sakaki is written 榊 with a doubly exceptional logograph.

First, the idea of sakaki is expressed with a melding of boku or ki 木 'tree' and shin or kami 神 'god; divine, sacred' [of Shinto 神道]; comparable to a graphic fusion of the word shinboku 神木 'sacred tree.'

(1995:11) The kanji 榊 first appears in the (12th-century) Konjaku Monogatarishū, but two 8th-century transcriptions of the word sakaki are 賢木, meaning "sage tree" (Kojiki, tr.