Mt. Togakushi

Mt. Togakushi.

Mt. Togakushi is named for a door. The myth runs as follows. In the founding chronicle of the Kojiki, the sun goddess Amaterasu, distressed by her brother's behavior, hides herself in a cave and seals the entrance with a rock. The world goes dark. The other gods, gathered outside, devise a strategy to lure her out — they hang a mirror in a sakaki tree, perform a comic dance, raise a great noise of laughter. Curious, Amaterasu pushes the rock door slightly aside to see what is happening. The strong god Ame-no-Tajikarao seizes the door and, in the violent gesture that returns the sun to the world, hurls it down from heaven.

The door, the rock door of the heavenly cave, falls. It lands here in northern Nagano. The serrated ridge of Togakushi — an actual blade of stone against the sky, the most dramatically jagged silhouette in central Japan — is the broken edge of that door.

This is not legend in the loose sense. This is the central Shintō myth, the origin of the sun's daily return, written into a specific geological feature you can walk to today. The integration of myth and landscape at Togakushi is more direct than anywhere else in Japan.

The Togakushi pilgrim circuit consists of five shrines, distributed along the foot of the ridge. Each anchors a different element of the myth. Hōkō-sha enshrines the goddess who hangs the mirror in the tree. Hi-no-miko-sha enshrines the comic dancer whose performance draws Amaterasu's curiosity. Chū-sha enshrines the deity who planned the strategy. Oku-sha, at the head of a 2-kilometer cryptomeria avenue, enshrines the strong god who seized the door itself. Kuzuryū-sha, the oldest, enshrines a more ancient water-dragon deity who occupied this place before the myth arrived and was incorporated into the new theology. Walking all five, in sequence, is the proper pilgrim's day.

The cedar avenue to Oku-sha is one of the most beautiful sacred approaches in Japan. The trees are 400 years old, planted in two perfect rows; the path runs straight for over a kilometer between them; the light, even at noon, is filtered to a green twilight. People walking the avenue tend to fall silent unprompted. The path produces its own quiet.

Beyond Oku-sha, the trail steepens sharply into the chain section of the ridge. The Kissho-rock pass requires committing to iron links over an exposed face; below you, a few hundred meters of drop. Grip the chains and you are, in the literal Togakushi reading, gripping the door of heaven. The ridge is real. The myth is also real. The Togakushi school of Shugendō, founded in the medieval period and largely dispersed by the Meiji separation but preserved in fragments, understood them as the same thing. They were not symbolic of one another. They were one another.