Kumano preserves the least mediated nature worship of any major Japanese site, and it also shows most clearly what the Meiji government did to Japanese religion.
The falls
At Kumano Nachi Taisha, the object of worship is the waterfall itself.
Nachi Falls drops a hundred and thirty-three metres in a single fall. It is not a place where a kami is enshrined; the falls are the kami, venerated directly, with a torii at the foot and no building between the worshipper and the water.
That directness is rare. Most Shinto worship is mediated by a shrine building housing an object in which the kami is present. At Nachi there is no intermediary, and this is generally taken as the oldest layer of Japanese religion showing through.
Three shrines as one
Kumano Hongu Taisha, Kumano Hayatama Taisha and Kumano Nachi Taisha are separate shrines, some distance apart, worshipped as a single triad, the Kumano Sanzan. Each enshrines the deities of the other two, so a pilgrim who visits all three visits each deity three times.
Honji suijaku
By the tenth century the three were fully integrated into the honji suijaku scheme, the doctrine that kami are local manifestations of buddhas, the buddha being the honji, the original ground, and the kami the suijaku, the trace left in Japan.
Each Kumano deity was paired with a specific buddha or bodhisattva: Hongu's with Amida, Hayatama's with Yakushi, Nachi's with Kannon.
This was not a compromise or a folk confusion. It was a worked-out theology and the ordinary condition of Japanese religion for the better part of a thousand years. Shrines had temples in them, monks served kami, and the distinction a modern visitor draws between "a shrine" and "a temple" would have made limited sense to a medieval pilgrim.
Retired emperors made the Kumano journey repeatedly, one is recorded as having gone more than thirty times. By the fifteenth century the crowds of commoners on the paths were described as moving like ants.
1868
The new Meiji government ordered shinbutsu bunri, the separation of kami and buddhas.
Shrine monks were defrocked or made to become shrine priests. Buddhist titles for kami were abolished. Buddhist statues, bells, sutras and halls were removed from shrine precincts across the country.
Haibutsu kishaku
What followed exceeded what was ordered. Haibutsu kishaku, "abolish the Buddha, destroy Shakyamuni", saw temples destroyed, images burned, and bronzes melted down.
Two things should be said precisely:
- The destruction was largely local rather than centrally directed. The government ordered separation, not demolition, and in places moved to restrain what it had started.
- The motives were substantially fiscal and factional. Temple land could be seized, temple bronze was worth money, and domains in financial difficulty had reasons beyond doctrine.
Estimates of temples lost run from many thousands to tens of thousands and do not reconcile. No reliable figure exists.
At Kumano the separation was carried through, but the Buddhist temple beside Nachi Falls, Seiganto-ji, survived, and its pagoda framed against the falls is now the most reproduced religious image in Japan. Precisely why it survived when so much else did not is not established.
Now
Hongu Taisha was moved to its present site in 1891 after a flood destroyed much of it at the river confluence where it had stood. A steel torii thirty-four metres high, the largest in the world, marks the original ground.
UNESCO inscribed the routes in 2004. Wakayama and Galicia recognise each other's pilgrimages, so a walker completing both the Kumano Kodo and the Camino de Santiago can be certified as a dual pilgrim.