Koya-san 2004: No Crowds, No Plans & No Digital Camera

Our train rattled and shook as we wound higher through the ancient forests that blanket the mountains of Wakayama. Through my window I watched the rough and rocky Fudotani River appear and disappear again, then turned to my friend and co-worker Amos. “You know anything about this Koya-san place, by the way?”

Amos laughed. He was the kind of guy who, when he wasn't already laughing, was getting ready to. “Yeah, I hear the illegal camping is fantastic!”

Koya-san, the mountaintop temple complex we were ostensibly heading for, was still a virtual mystery to me - one because I’d never been there before, and two because I’d done zero research on the place. But this was all par for the course. I find out a place exists and I want to go, for no other reason than I’ve never been there. The research part I prefer to do on the spot. Evidently Amos was one to do the same.

So it was in the summer of 2004 when I found myself making the clackety trip up to the roof of Japan’s Kii Peninsula with my co-worker of a month and a half.

We took the train as far as Hosokawa, getting off at a tiny wooden train station that was utterly deserted save for a couple of flying insects and some half-dried bird poop. This was, according to the map we’d picked up while switching trains in Osaka, where we would find the trailhead for a ten-kilometer stretch of woods and (maybe) isolation that would take us up to the Koya-san plateau and the temple complex founded by a monk named Kukai well over a thousand years ago.

A few hours walking through unknown woods is a fine way to sate one's appetite for mild adventure, though hiking up from Hosokawa would serve a couple of additional purposes. Cutting the train ride short and skipping the cable car to Koya-san would save us a fair bit of pocket change, which would prove helpful should we happen to find a place in Koya-san that sold food.

There was also the fact that we'd just spent another week indoors teaching English. We were like a couple of dogs that had been in the car too long. We needed to let ourselves loose for a while. This was one way we knew how.

We found what we thought was the trail and started walking.

This being 2004, I was still using a film camera. Me being me, I don’t have a clear recollection of the hike outside of the few pictures I took. This only makes me want to go do the hike again. I wonder what Amos is up to this weekend.

The trail spit us out at the western edge of the serene temple sprawl of Koya-san where we were greeted by Daimon, a 25-meter-tall orange gate with the twin Buddha-guarding demons known as Nio making furious faces from inside their cages. I'd say that after a thousand years they probably feel like a couple of cooped-up dogs too, even if they are made of wood.

Though the original, and the second, and the third and maybe the fourth Daimon had burned down over the centuries, the one standing before us now had been here for over three hundred years. Someday this one too would likely burn to the ground, but what were the chances that it would happen tonight? If there were an ATM around I would have been willing to bet someone a few yen. And if it rained? Daimon's eaves reached several meters out over its concrete base, on either side. With overnight rain possible and the chances of fire infinitesimal this seemed as good a place as any to pitch our tent.

Later. After dark. Very quietly.

Amos and I stumbled around for a few hours, gawking lazily at the various reconstructions of the age-old temples that make up this western section of Koya-san. Kondo, the massive hall built by Kukai for Buddhist rituals and dance parties, was originally constructed in 819. Since then it has burned down a lucky seven times. The present building dates from 1932.

Konpon Daito is a tall, bright orange pagoda-like affair. The second level is rounded, like a huge marshmallow being gently smushed between the square first and second story roofs.

Kongobu-ji Temple serves as the administrative center of the three thousand and whatever hundred Shingon Buddhism temples that exist in Japan. Among the many rooms of Kongobu is the Yanagi-no-ma, beautifully adorned with exquisite 16th Century paintings that have overseen, among other events, Toyotomi Hidetsugu’s ritual seppuku suicide. There is also a fantastically-detailed rock garden out back - so I hear. Amos and I didn’t see that or anything else because we elected to save the five hundred yen entrance fee since we still hadn’t eaten since our rice ball breakfast.

Also residing on the West Side of Koya-san are structures called Toto, Saito, Miedo and Fudodo, which may sound like characters in a Japanese cartoon about four puppy siblings but they are actually buildings with serious purposes though I’ll be honest and say I don’t know what.

Amos and I didn't completely bail on the historical details of Koya-san. Having saved on Kongobu-ji we decided to splurge and fork over the one hundred yen fee to enter the outer edges of Tokugawa Reidai Mausoleum.

That's right, the outer edges. Sweaty, smelly English teachers (and everyone else) are apparently prohibited from checking out the interior. As consolation we got pamphlets with nice photos of all the cool things we weren't allowed to see for ourselves.

Our pamphlet tried to tell us that this was the mausoleum for three Tokugawa shoguns, including Ieyasu, the man who unified Japan in 1600 and thereby established the Tokugawa Shogunate as the ruling clan for the next two hundred and sixty-odd years. But I distinctly remembered visiting Ieyasu’s tomb up north in Nikko in 2002. Either I don’t understand what’s going on with the mausoleums around here or the Tokugawas had a thing for building lavish and wasteful duplicates of the places they’ll rot away in. Probably both.

This dual-mausoleum issue was as far as my knowledge of Japanese history went – and it didn't even get me an answer. Amos was no help either. Naturally, to a couple of guys who hadn’t done their research on the history of all the things we’d traveled all morning and hiked three hours to see, finding food was the highlight of the afternoon.

I’d been in Japan almost three years by this point. Amos was still counting his time in Japan by weeks. So I let him do all the talking with the nice old woman at the nice old place we found. This was, in part, a strategy to hide my inability to read the menu items spelled out on the walls. But it was also good fun at Amos’s expense.

As we resumed bumming around West Koya it occurred to us: there was no one else around. This was June. Where were all the summer crowds? We were either doing something very wrong or very right.

Come early evening we did something that was probably very wrong: in the woods, just out of sight from anyone who might come by to take a look at Daimon, we set up camp for the night. No campfires, no music, and barely anything to do except watch the world get dark and hope that there were no bears around. Not that we had a single scrap of food between us to attract so much as an ant.

Morning brought the kind of misty, cloud-heavy view of the surrounding mountains that evokes fanciful images of what life was like up here a thousand years ago. Up here, it is written, there was peace and prosperity. For centuries countless students of both Jodo and Shingon Buddhism came here to pursue the intangible treasures of spirituality. At one point Koya-san was home to fifteen hundred monasteries and thousands of monks.

Then in the 16th Century an asshole named Oda Nobunaga decided he should prove his political and military worth by slaughtering a whole bunch of the monks who had been doing nothing but minding their own peaceful business. A century later the Tokugawas assumed the role of assholes and destroyed much of the spiritual and material wealth that the monks and lay priests of Koya-san enjoyed because nothing says power like sending in your armed troops to butcher a community of robed and barefoot monks.

Koya-san has since regained its peaceful allure – which in turn has been destroyed by the daily onslaught of the tourist hordes. Take heart though; there are a few ways to avoid the crush. You can make the trip up here off-season, meaning not during the summer and not during Japan’s Golden Week, a ten-day string of national holidays straddling April and May. You could also stay the night in one of the temples, which not only offers a glimpse into the monastic life but allows for peaceful, almost magical early morning and late evening walks. This I know from my second trip to Koya-san, fourteen years and an exponential increase of overseas travelers to Japan since my first.

And of course, you can do what only the most adventurous and untethered do: Get off the train at Hosokawa and start walking. I’m pretty sure there’s been no increase in this brand of travel.