Koya-san 2018: Train Schedules, Trail Maps & the Company You Keep

My second trip to Koya-san came in 2018, a mere fourteen years and a few months after my first. And this time, everything was different. I wasn’t with anyone named Amos. I had a smartphone instead of a disposable Fuji-film camera. I would not be camping, illegally or otherwise. And instead of hiking part of the way I’d be taking the train all the way to the top.

When did life become so boring?

This wasn’t a trip, exactly. It was a last-minute reconnaissance mission. And I had only so much time to get up the mountain, get acquainted with Koya-san (the part I missed my first time here), and get back down the mountain and out to Kansai International Airport south of Osaka where I’d meet up with a group of thirteen Slovenian women.

Like most sacred and serene places that have turned into tourist circuses, Koya-san has been made extremely easy to reach and then navigate. I could have skipped this recon mission and blindly led my group around Koya-san’s East Side, including the sprawling crown jewel of Oku-no-in, without looking stupid. I like to avoid looking stupid whenever I can though, so back up into the Wakayama mountains I went.

All the ins and outs of getting to Koya-san can easily be found online so I won’t bother - though I will offer a couple of tips I haven’t seen anywhere else. One, transfer to the Nankai Line at Namba Station. It may look like you can save a bit of time catching the Hashimoto-bound train with a transfer at Shin-Imamiya but ‘Shin-Imamiya’ is actually a code word in the passenger train industry. It means ‘hell’.

If none of this makes sense to you, that’s fine.

But if you ever find yourself trying to get to Koya-san you’ll need to know that Namba is good and Shin-Imamiya is bad. Try to remember.

The other secret I picked up on my time-sensitive recon mission is this: If you’re traveling with a big heavy suitcase on wheels, either store it at Namba Station’s second-floor luggage service center or ship it from Namba (or your last hotel) to wherever you’re going after Koya-san. Navigating your way to and around Koya-san isn’t too difficult. But dragging your crap up and onto the cable car that sits at a forty-five degree angle…then dragging it up the narrow steps inside the cable car as you search for an empty seat (negotiating all the other big bulky suitcases in your way)… then off the cable car and up more stairs to the top cable car station… through and around to your bus platform… and, finally, onto a bus that was designed for Japanese locals and minimalist monks, not big white people (or any other invading color) with big huge suitcases; the endeavor is, in a word, amassiveannoyanceforyouandeveryonearoundyou. Avoid it. Trust me, your trip to Koya-san will be so much nicer.

Just ask my thirteen Slovenian ladies.

One more thing…

…and then I’m done giving travel advice (because quite frankly I hate giving unsolicited travel advice). Spend a night in Koya-san. Yes, you can do a day trip from Osaka or even Nara, but it will end up feeling more like a recon mission – and probably without the part where you meet thirteen Slovenian women afterward.

Not only is there more to see in Koya-san than you can reasonably fit into one day, the best times to see the best parts are early morning and in the evening when the crowds of big Westerners with their big wheeled suitcases as well as the loud-mouth, self-absorbed Chinese tourists have made themselves blessedly scarce. This goes for just about anywhere, but considering Koya-san’s relative isolation an overnight stay is virtually imperative – unless you’re the kind who prefers recon missions. Plus staying the night offers the chance to sleep and eat in a temple, giving you a feel for the life of a monk, albeit a fleeting and superficial one.

However! (All right, I lied. One more bit of advice.) If you can – and this goes for traveling to Japan in general – come in the Spring or the Fall. The crowds are lighter (except during Golden Week) and the temps are significantly more agreeable. And while the cherry blossoms are much more spectacular down in Yoshino, the pockets of fall colors splashed around Koya-san make the unique experience of Oku-no-in even better.

Now, this last morsel of wisdom is not advice. It’s a warning. Don’t come to Koya-san to experience the temples. They’re nice, don’t get me wrong. But they alone do not justify making the trek up here. Oku-no-in is what makes this place special. That said, making a day trip out of Koya-san is certainly possible; a few hours exploring Koya-san is sufficient. You’ll just have to share it with the hordes.

So what’s so special about Oku-no-in?

Konishiki against one of his less formidable foes.

Yes, Oku-no-in is Japan’s largest cemetery, with over 200,000 grave markers and counting. (Yes, after more than a thousand years they are still adding graves.) But just because something is the biggest doesn't mean it’s the best. Consider sumo wrestler Konishiki, who never achieved the top rank of Yokozuna.

The history of this place certainly sets it apart from Japan’s eight million other cemeteries. A monk by the name of Kukai established this remote, forested mountain plateau retreat back in 816 as a place to pursue and teach the esoteric wisdom that he picked up while in China on spring break. These teachings have come to define the Shingon sect of Buddhism, one of Japan’s largest.

Over time Kukai’s high-altitude hideaway grew into a bustling barefoot community of monks. In 834 Kukai pulled his last trick (for the time being) and entered into eternal meditation. That’s right, though Kobo Daishi (Kukai’s posthumous name) is entombed here he is not dead yet. He’s resting. Reminds me of a monty python skit.

According to the legend, Kobo Daishi is waiting for Miroku Nyorai, the Buddha of the future, to arrive and wake him up. Not one to waste time, he multi-tasks in his sleepy state, offering salvation to those who seek it. For this reason, this is THE place to spend eternity. Not everyone can end up here, though, so many will visit and leave an eyebrow hair or a fingernail. Better than nothing, I guess.

Exploring Oku-no-in

The traditional entrance to Oku-no-in is the rather understated Ichinohashi Bridge. This footbridge serves as the passageway into the sacred ground of the cemetery that lines the two-kilometer path leading gently through the impressive cedar forest and past those almost quarter-million tombstones. Many of them are centuries old. Many are covered in moss. Even for Japan, it is rare to feel like you are walking through the land as it was a millennium ago. Here, you do. Unless there are big people with big suitcases around.

And like I said earlier, the atmosphere is most serene, most striking in the early morning hours or in the hours before and after nightfall. Rainy, misty conditions take away from the experience not one bit, and may even enhance the enchantment only a cemetery can offer.

If you’re pressed for time, if you aren’t quite up for the extended stroll, or if you’re just plain lazy, you can take a town bus all the way to Oku-no-in-mae bus stop and cut your walk in half. Note though that you’ll be walking through a recently-added section of the cemetery, where all the graves are nice and new and nothing special. You’d still see Oku-no-in, but you’d be missing all the other good stuff. Which would be like, I don’t know, heading straight for the centerfold.

Along the walk from Ichinobashi, among the thousands of long-forgotten departed, are countless side paths and trails. Don’t hesitate. Go check out a few of them. Your chances of getting lost are nil. (If need be, just listen for the loud-mouth tourists.) Like these short diversions, the main path is not completely flat – you can count on a few slopes and short staircases. But these minor matters are more than fully offset by the scenery.

The Main Event

Right outside the boundaries of Oku-no-in proper sits the Gokusho Offering Hall and, just to the side, a row of Jizo, which are representations of the benevolent little deities believed to look after travelers and the souls of young and unborn children. These particular Jizo are called Mizumuke Jizo, which means you get to splash them with water while you pray for your deceased loved ones. Go ahead. It’s fun. Just remember to pretend to be serious.

The Gobyobashi Bridge takes you over into the uber-sacred grounds of Kobo Daishi’s final resting place (until he wakes up and gets back to business). This means crossing over from the land where eating, drinking and taking pictures is allowed into the land where it is not. Mind your manners. To your left (unless you are walking backwards in which case it’s on your right) you’ll have the chance to test both your strength and your fate with the Miroku Stone. This revered rock sits in a cage, surrounded by a crowd of hopefuls taking turns sticking their arms through the hole in the mesh and trying to lift it with one hand – a feat which, if accomplished, gets you lots of great existential prizes.

The Toro-do is the Lantern Hall where, predictably, there are lanterns. Ten thousand of them, actually, give or take. They are said to be eternally lit. Behind the Toro-do is Kobo Daishi’s mausoleum, Gobyo, where the man the legend is said to be meditating until those lanterns go out.

Ten thousand lanterns. Two hundred thousand gravestones. Eternity. All impressive numbers. Sadly, I wouldn’t have time to confirm any of them.

I had a date with thirteen Slovenian women – and their luggage.

Train or Trail? Depends on Who’s Going.

For me, Koya-san isn’t just a place. This 1,200-year-old ode to Buddhism is an experience – and a truly unique one at that. But like all unique experiences, as it is for travel itself, how you get there can make a huge difference in what you take away.

If I ever go back to Koya-san, I want to hike up again.

That, of course, will probably depend on the company I am with.

Nothing against my Slovenian girlfriends, but I think I’ll give Amos a call first.

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.