The Kumano Kodo

The Kumano roads are usually presented as a scenic survival, but the tradition that made them a pilgrimage was deliberately taken apart by the modern state, and what walks them now is a partial reconstruction.

A combinatory faith

The Kumano deities were understood through honji-suijaku as local manifestations of buddhas, so the three grand shrines were Shinto and Buddhist at once, and the road was walked by monks, retired emperors, women and commoners together. The phrase describing the Kumano pilgrimage of the ants records a road so continuously full that it resembled an ant trail. This was a single combinatory religion, not two traditions sharing a path.

Two collapses

The Meiji government forced the separation of Shinto and Buddhism from 1868, dismantling the very combination the route expressed, and twentieth-century road building then made the shrines reachable without walking at all. The walking revival dates only from the 1990s and accelerated after the World Heritage inscription in 2004, when Kumano and the Camino established a joint dual-pilgrim certificate. The landscape is continuous; the religious world that gave the road its meaning was interrupted and has been only partly restored.

The Kumano roads were not walked in silence between shrines. They were punctuated by oji, subsidiary shrines placed along the way, conventionally spoken of as the ninety nine oji, at which the traveller stopped to make offerings, purify, rest and in the imperial period to hold poetry contests and dedicate sutras. Some survive as buildings, many as a stone marker in a clearing, and the sequence is what turned a mountain path into a liturgy: the pilgrimage was performed continuously rather than at the destination.

The imperial pilgrimages of the eleventh and twelfth centuries were vast undertakings. Retired emperors made the journey from Kyoto dozens of times, with retinues of hundreds, and the road was maintained for them.

Kumano's emblem is the yatagarasu, a crow with three legs, which in the chronicles guided the first emperor Jimmu through these mountains. It appears on the shrines' talismans, the goo hoin, printed in a script assembled entirely out of small crow figures, and those slips were used to swear oaths: an oath written on the back of a Kumano crow talisman was held to be binding under supernatural penalty, and samurai and merchants used them as contracts.

The Omine Okugake, the high traverse used by Shugendo practitioners, remains partly closed to women, a restriction that is defended as an unbroken ascetic tradition and contested as discrimination, and the argument is live.

Since 2015 the Kumano Kodo and the Camino de Santiago have operated a formal partnership, and a walker who completes qualifying sections of both can be registered as a dual pilgrim by the two authorities. They are the only two pilgrimage routes inscribed by UNESCO as World Heritage.