Begin with the disappointment, because everything after is easier. Cryptomeria japonica is not a cedar. True cedars sit in Cedrus, among the pines; this tree belongs to Cupressaceae, the cypress family, alongside the bald cypress of the swamp and the junipers in the fencerow. Older books file the genus under Taxodiaceae with the redwoods, a family since folded away and retired, which is why two reference shelves will put the same tree in two places without either being wrong at the time of printing. The genus name is Greek for hidden parts, after the concealed floral structures, and japonica records where Europeans first met the tree rather than where the tree stops.

In Japan the tree is sugi, and sugi is less a garden plant than a piece of national furniture. Shrines and temples stand enclosed by them. The wood is light, straight-grained, aromatic and strongly rot resistant, and has been coopered into sake barrels for centuries. The avenue leading to Nikko was planted between 1628 and 1648 and still runs 35 kilometers, the longest tree-lined avenue anywhere. On Yakushima, off the southern tip of Kyushu, a primeval forest of yakusugi earned World Heritage listing in 1993; the oldest of those trees are over a thousand years old, and one sectioned trunk carried 1,776 countable rings. The famous seven-thousand-year claim is folklore, and the truth is remarkable enough without it.

In the American South sugi arrived as a replacement for something that failed. Leyland cypress went into hedge rows across the Southeast for thirty years and then began dying in them, and Clemson now names 'Yoshino' outright as the better answer. That is the tree's working life here: a screen, a windbreak, a green wall along a property line. Give more than that where you can. The bark is a fine cinnamon red and peels away in strips, and the branching tiers out with age into something genuinely architectural. Plant in acid soil, site for morning sun so the foliage dries early, allow real air movement between plants, and water through a Southern drought. This is not a juniper and will not pretend to be one.

Two honest cautions. Most cultivars bronze in winter, some to a rusty copper, and the color is a pigment the needles make as sunscreen against cold-weather light rather than any sign of trouble; 'Radicans' holds green if that matters to you. And branch dieback has been reported on Japanese cedar across the Southeast for several years now without a confident diagnosis from anyone, the region's own plant clinics included. Spacing, siting and water are the levers that work. Find more evergreen structure among our Conifers, the rest of the screening plants in Large Shrubs, and further Japanese introductions in Origins: Japan.