Koyasan sits at 900 meters in the mountains of Wakayama Prefecture, accessible by a cable car that climbs at a genuinely alarming angle. The town at the top has about 2,500 permanent residents and 117 temples. In the evenings, when the day-trippers have gone back down, it belongs to the monks and whoever is staying overnight.
I stayed two nights.
Shukubo
Temple lodging (宿坊, shukubo) means a room in a working monastery. Mine was at Ekoin — tatami, paper screens, a small tokonoma alcove with a scroll and a single branch of forced cherry blossom.
Meals are shojin ryori, the Buddhist vegetarian cuisine: tofu in multiple preparations, pickled vegetables, miso soup, rice, a small dessert of sweet potato or chestnut. No meat, no fish, no alliums. It sounds austere. It's actually extraordinary — the kind of cooking that happens when you have centuries of practice and only seven ingredients to work with.
Dinner is at 5:30pm. By 8pm the corridors are silent.
Okunoin
The cemetery at Okunoin is the largest in Japan — 200,000 graves stretching along a two-kilometer path through ancient cedar forest. The cedars are the thing. They're enormous — some of them 500 years old, their trunks the circumference of a small car, their canopy so thick that even in rain the ground beneath stays nearly dry.
I walked through at dusk. The lanterns in the central mausoleum were lit. The cedar smell was overwhelming in a good way.
I was one of maybe six people in the entire cemetery. A monk passed me going the other direction, noticed my presence without acknowledging it, and continued. The correct response to a stranger in a cemetery at dusk on a sacred mountain is apparently to keep walking, which seems right.
Morning
The morning service begins at 6am. You don't have to attend but you're welcome. The chanting starts before dawn — low, rhythmic, very old. I sat in the back and didn't understand a word and felt completely fine about that.
Breakfast was at 7am. More tofu. Still excellent.