Ryohei Takagi must be frozen. In the spirit of an ancient ritual, he has just spent 40 minutes in the freezing waters of Nachi Falls – at 133 metres Japan’s highest waterfall.
‘You must develop special powers of body and mind together,’ he says. ‘I felt the cold’s pain but overcame this by focusing – so I felt nothing except the water passing through my body.’
Since Friedrich Nietzsche first posited the concept of the ‘superman’ in 1883, it has engaged both high and popular culture, but the German philosopher was some centuries behind the Yamabushi mountain hermits of the Kii Peninsula on Honshu island’s southernmost edge.
This ascetic group had spent well over a thousand years developing their spiritual powers in a contest with nature in the region of Kumano or the ‘Pure Land’.
The Yamabushi are said to have been at their peak in the 10th century. In an era when creature comforts were pretty limited even for the most cosseted princeling, they took mortification of the flesh to new heights. During winter they lived in caves, surviving on limited food, undertaking taki-gyo (water immersion), practising martial arts, and performing okugake – ritualistic hikes.
They became much respected as mystics, healers and even warriors before eventually falling from favour during Japan’s nationalistic Meiji Restoration (1868-1945). In recent years, however, they have returned, with Takagi leading a modest revival of Shugendo – their doctrine. He now heads a group of 50 Yamabushi.
The forests and valleys of Kumano hold many such secrets. This Unesco World Heritage-listed area is endowed with myriad sacred sites. The designation reflects Kumano’s importance to Japan’s spiritual development: in particular a fusion of Shinto-Buddhist ideology with indigenous nature-worship. Its reputation as a heavenly paradise also made it hugely popular for pilgrimage during Japan’s Heian Era (794-1185). First emperors and then nobility came on 40-day pilgrimages with huge retinues. Then hoards of ordinary Japanese followed, creating a network of paths known as Kumano Kodo. So many arrived that the Kodo was once described as resembling a ‘procession of ants’.
‘Worshipping Kumano’s deities led pilgrims to believe they would be forgiven, purified, and saved in the past, —present, and future,’ says ex-pat Canadian Brad Towle, information officer at Tanabe City Tourism Bureau, ‘a pilgrimage to Kumano was a journey of salvation’.
Nowadays travelling to Kumano isn’t so arduous – it is just a high-speed train journey from Osaka or Kyoto – and the Kumano Kodo remains fully open and popular with hikers. Indented bays of ripening persimmon and satsuma terraces stand out among mountainsides cloaked with oak, cypress and camphor.
I stay overnight at Tanabe: a pleasant city of 80,000 and birthplace of Morihei Ueshiba – founder of the aikido martial art. From here, pilgrims venturing south from Kyoto would have turned inland into the mountains taking the Nakahechi (central) trail. Besides eternal salvation, they sought the Kumano Sanzan: a trio of grand shrines. The Sanzan possess both architectural distinctiveness and a doctrine born out of religious syncretism (an inclusive approach to other faiths). They are Shinto shrines that adopted deities derived from an ancient folk worship of nature and then subsequently fused with Buddhist doctrine so these deities became incarnations of Buddha.
After a week’s gruelling hike from Tanabe, the first Sanzan shrine pilgrims encountered was Hongu, a place where today an immense 34-metre-high torii gate marks the dividing line between the terrestial world and that of the gods.
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