Mt. Ōyama

Mt. Ōyama.

Mt. Ōyama is the people's mountain. In the Edo period, when much of Japanese Shugendō was the strictly-guarded preserve of mountain monks, Ōyama was the exception — an ordinary climber's pilgrimage, open to anyone, scaled by hundreds of thousands of commoners each year.

The numbers are remarkable. By the mid-eighteenth century, perhaps one in five adult men in the lowland villages of Kanagawa, Edo, and the surrounding provinces had climbed Ōyama at least once. Some climbed every year. They formed kō, lay pilgrim societies, that rotated membership through annual summit visits — a kind of mutual-aid cooperative organized around a sacred mountain. The kō had treasurers, schedules, prescribed prayers, and group robes. They were the dominant form of popular religion in eastern Japan for two centuries.

The Ōyama climber wore a simple white cotton robe and carried, traditionally, a wooden sword — a tachimonsui — as offering to the mountain. The sword was painted with the climber's name and prayer. At the summit it was deposited at Afuri Jinja, the shrine of the rain god. The tradition still continues. Wooden swords accumulate at the shrine in stacks; old ones are burned in winter ceremonies; new ones go up each spring.

The deity of Ōyama is Ōyamatsumi-no-Ōkami, the great god of mountains, conflated since at least the medieval period with the dragon that brings rain. The name Afuri itself means rain-fall. Climb in mist and you understand why. Ōyama sits exactly where the moisture rolling in from the Pacific meets the cooler air of the Kantō hills; it makes weather constantly. From the Kantō plain, dry and busy, the mountain appears wrapped in its own private cloud nine days in ten. The pilgrim, climbing into the cloud, walks directly into the place where Kantō's rain begins.

The summit shrine is modest — a small wooden building among rocks, with one of the great views of Sagami Bay on the rare clear day when the cloud opens. The Edo pilgrims who climbed here typically did so in groups, slept overnight at the lower oshi houses (pilgrim-priest inns), made their summit visit at dawn, and returned home within two or three days. The whole experience was domestic, organized, social — a mountain religion shaped by the rhythms of farming village life.

The mountain does not insist on austerity or terror, the way Ishizuchi or Ōmine do. Its sacredness is the sacredness of the ordinary: the practical god who governs the harvest, the steady season, the rain that comes when expected. Ordinary climbers, sacred work.