Kumano Sanzan

Kumano Sanzan: Three Grand Shrines at the Heart of Japan's Most Storied Pilgrimage

The name Kumano Sanzan, the "Three Mountains of Kumano," refers to three grand Shinto shrines on the Kii Peninsula's southeastern flank: Kumano Hongū Taisha in Tanabe, Kumano Hayatama Taisha in Shingū, and Kumano Nachi Taisha in Nachikatsuura. Two Buddhist temples sit alongside them in the historic complex: Nachisan Seiganto-ji, the first stop on the Saigoku Kannon pilgrimage, and Fudarakusan-ji, once the launch site for a strange and grave ritual of seaborne renunciation. Together they form a layered sacred landscape that has drawn pilgrims down rough mountain trails for more than a thousand years.

The whole ensemble was designated a national Historic Site under the name Kumano Sanzan on November 2, 2000, with the perimeter expanded and the title formalized on December 19, 2002. Four years later, in July 2004, the same shrines and temples were inscribed by UNESCO as components of "Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range." The protected zone now stretches across Wakayama and Mie prefectures, taking in the precincts of all five sites along with affiliated sub-shrines, a sacred island in the Kumano River, and the granite-strewn hillside of Kamikura.

Three Cults That Became One

Each of the three shrines began as a separate, much older cult tied to a striking feature of the landscape. At Nachi, worshippers revered the 133-meter waterfall that drops in a single sheet from the forested ridge; at Shingū, they worshipped a massive boulder called Gotobiki-iwa, perched on a steep hillside above the river mouth; and at Hongū, they revered a wooded island, Ōyunohara, sitting at the confluence of the Kumano, Otonashi, and Iwata rivers. None of these places needed buildings to be sacred. The natural form was the god.

By the late Heian period, around the eleventh century, the three sites began to acknowledge one another's deities. Through the doctrine of honji suijaku, the principle that native kami were manifestations of Buddhist figures, each shrine's chief god received a Buddhist identity. Kumano Hongū's Ketsumimiko was paired with Amida; Hayatama's deity with Yakushi, the Healing Buddha; and Nachi's deity with the thousand-armed Kannon. The combined pantheon, twelve deities in all, became known as the Kumano Twelve Manifestations.

The result was a religious experiment unusual even by Japanese standards: a Pure Land of this world, where the prospect of rebirth in paradise was made concrete in a single mountainous corner of the country. From 1090 onward, retired emperors began making the long journey south from Kyoto, treading the Kumano Kodō trails through the Kii ranges. Retired Emperor Goshirakawa is said to have made the pilgrimage more than thirty times. Aristocrats followed, then warriors, then commoners in such numbers that the procession came to be called an "ant pilgrimage to Kumano."

Why the Site Matters

The Historic Site designation rests on something more specific than reputation. It recognizes that the physical ground itself, including the original locations of buildings now lost, holds the archaeological evidence of more than a millennium of organized religious practice. The criterion cited by the Agency for Cultural Affairs reads simply: "remains of shrines and temples, former precincts, and other sites associated with worship and faith."

Inscriptions on the Mt. Gongen hillside behind Hayatama Taisha mark sutra-burial mounds dating from the twelfth century. The river island of Ōyunohara, where Hongū Taisha stood until a catastrophic flood in 1889, still preserves the footprint of the older shrine. Beneath the courtyard at Nachi lies a celebrated trove of bronzes and Buddhist statues unearthed in 1918, evidence of the rich Heian and early medieval ritual life along the Nachi River. The protected zone thus encompasses both the working religious sites of today and the buried record of what came before.

Kumano Hongū Taisha and the Vast Torii of Ōyunohara

Hongū Taisha is reached today by climbing a long stone stairway through tall cedars; the entire approach has a deliberate, monastic feeling. The four upper shrines housed in the current halls, finished in dark cypress bark, are direct descendants of structures that stood for centuries on the river island of Ōyunohara. In August 1889 a flood on the Kumano River swept much of that older complex away. Surviving structures were relocated in 1891 to the higher ground where the shrine now stands.

To grasp what was lost, walk five minutes from the shrine through rice fields to the original site. There a steel torii rises 33.9 meters into the air, with a 42-meter span, the largest in Japan. It marks the entrance to a quiet wooded clearing where two stone shrines now stand in for the eight halls washed away by the flood. Photographs are not permitted past the torii. The hush, after the noise of the highway, is its own form of welcome.

Look for the three-legged crow, Yatagarasu, on banners and on the gable above the main gate. In one origin legend, the bird led the first emperor through these mountains from Kumano to the Yamato plain. The Football Association of Japan adopted the same symbol for its national crest. At Hongū, you will see Yatagarasu sculpted in iron, woven in straw, and inked into the unusual Kumano Goōhōin talismans, the calligraphy of which is built up from eighty-eight stylized crows.

Kumano Hayatama Taisha, Kamikura Shrine, and an Island in the River

Hayatama Taisha sits within walking distance of Shingū Station, just back from the mouth of the Kumano River. The current vermilion main hall dates from rebuilding after a 1883 fire; in the precinct grows a sacred Nagi (Nageia nagi) tree estimated at over a thousand years old, a Natural Monument in its own right. Attached to the shrine is the Shinpōkan museum, which holds more than 1,200 items registered as National Treasures or Important Cultural Properties: lacquered cosmetic boxes, court costumes, and folding fans presented in the Muromachi period by emperors, retired emperors, and the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu.

Five hundred steep, uneven stone steps lead up the south face of Mt. Gongen to Kamikura Shrine. The "shrine" turns out to be a small wooden structure tucked beneath an immense balanced boulder, Gotobiki-iwa. This is where, in local legend, the deities of Kumano first descended. On the night of February 6 each year, some two thousand white-robed men carrying lit torches charge down those same steps as part of the Otō Matsuri fire festival, a rite descended from the most ancient form of Kumano worship.

Drift roughly 1.6 kilometers upstream and a small wooded islet appears in the river: Mifune-jima, included in the Historic Site as part of Hayatama Taisha's domain. It serves as the turning point for the autumn Mifune Matsuri (October 15–16), in which nine narrow racing boats circle the island three times in a riotous, oar-driven sprint while a vermilion barge bears the deity on its annual passage to a riverside lodging shrine.

Kumano Nachi Taisha, the Waterfall, and Seiganto-ji

The climb to Nachi Taisha is the steepest of the three. From the village below, 467 stone steps lift you to a fan-shaped courtyard, six vermilion halls grouped at angles around a central plaza rather than lined up in a row. A great camphor said to be 850 years old grows beside the main hall. Its trunk is hollow enough to walk through, a small rite of symbolic rebirth that pilgrims have been performing here for centuries.

Just to the south, sharing the same hilltop, stands Nachisan Seiganto-ji, a Tendai-school temple and the first of the thirty-three temples on the Saigoku Kannon circuit. Its main hall, in unpainted natural wood, was rebuilt in 1590 under the patronage of Toyotomi Hideyoshi and is now an Important Cultural Property. Step past the back of the hall and the view opens onto a celebrated composition: a vermilion three-story pagoda in the foreground, and beyond it the slender white plume of Nachi Falls dropping 133 meters down a vertical cliff. Photographs of this scene appear in nearly every guidebook to Japan, and the view still surprises in person.

To stand directly beneath the falls, descend 133 stone steps to Hirou Shrine, an unusual outpost of Nachi Taisha that has no main hall at all. The waterfall itself is the deity. Spring water collected from the basin can be tasted from a wooden ladle. Until the late nineteenth century the shrine and temple operated as a single syncretic complex; the Meiji separation of Buddhism and Shinto split them administratively, but visitors still routinely visit both within a single morning.

Fudarakusan-ji and the Voyage to Paradise

Twenty minutes' walk from Nachi Station and only a few hundred meters from the present-day shore lies Fudarakusan-ji, a Tendai temple founded according to tradition by Ragyō Shōnin, a monk said to have drifted across the sea from India in the fourth century. The temple is best known for a curious medieval rite called Fudaraku Tokai, "the passage to Mount Fudaraku."

From 868 to 1722, monks (and occasionally devout lay people) boarded a tiny wooden boat at the beach beyond the temple. The cabin, just wide enough to lie down in, was nailed shut from the outside, and the small vessel was towed out into the Kumano-nada and set adrift on the Kuroshio current. The destination was a paradise believed to lie far to the south, the Mount Potalaka of Kannon. A full-size replica of one of these strange boats, with its four small ritual torii framing the sealed cabin, sits in the temple grounds. Surviving records describe at least twenty-five such voyages. None returned.

The current main hall, built in 1990, replaced an older structure lost to a typhoon in 1808. Inside is a Heian-period seated image of the Thousand-Armed, Eleven-Headed Kannon, designated an Important Cultural Property. Behind the main hall stand carved stones inscribed with the names of the monks who set out, century by century, into the open sea.

Walking the Kumano Kodō

The three shrines are linked by the Kumano Kodō, the ancient stone-paved pilgrim paths designated together with the shrines as a World Heritage component. The Daimonzaka, a 600-meter ascent of 267 mossy cobblestone steps under a colonnade of cedars some 800 years old, is the most accessible introduction. Strong walkers can stitch longer routes between the shrines: Hosshinmon-ōji to Hongū is a half-day's walking, and the rugged Daikumotori-goe between Nachi and Hongū is a full mountain day.

Pilgrim costumes can be hired at the Daimonzaka tea house: heading up the steps in white Heian robes, you trade the modern path for something close to the experience of an aristocrat or warrior making the journey eight centuries ago. Several stretches of the Kodō, paved with stone laid down in the Edo period by the Kishū domain, still bear the wear of innumerable straw sandals.

Around the Shrines

Each of the three centers offers a different kind of pause between visits. At Hongū, the village is surrounded by hot springs: Yunomine, where pilgrims have been bathing for more than 1,800 years, has a small wooden bath, Tsuboyu, that is itself a World Heritage component. At Shingū, the rebuilt castle ruins above the town give a long view over the Kumano River as it broadens to the sea; the city is also one of the better places on the peninsula to eat fresh tuna landed at Katsuura. At Nachikatsuura, Katsuura harbor is Japan's busiest port for fresh-caught tuna, and the cliff-top inns of Nanki-Katsuura Onsen face a coast of small wooded islets that look much as they did when monks were setting off across them in their nailed-shut boats.