The earliest fossil record of the genus Pseudotsuga (Pinaceae) in Asia, Pseudotsuga tanaii Huzioka, was reexamined with additional materials of seeds, leaves, cones, and twigs from the earliest Miocene Shichiku Flora of the Joban area, northeast Japan. These specimens were restudied to better understand the relationship of these fossils with the extant and fossil species from Asia. Pseudotsuga tanaii not only shows characters common to the modern species in East Asia, but also yields similar characters seen in the American clade. Thus, it could be an ancestral taxon of the Asian clade, which appeared before the diversification of the East Asian species. In contrast to the extant Pseudotsuga species growing under warm-temperate climate conditions at middle to high elevations in the mountains, Pseudotsuga tanaii appears to have been associated with lowland vegetation growing at lake margins. Forest vegetation associated with the species is equivalent to the Mixed Northern Hardwood forest, which develops under cooler climatic conditions. The inferred habitat of Pseudotsuga tanaii and its age support the hypothesis based on molecular phylogeny and morphological analyses that the genus originated in the higher latitudes during the early Paleogene and migrated south following the climatic deterioration during the late Paleogene.