A thousand years ago, in the heyday of the Japanese imperial court, royals and nobles would embark on weeks-long treks to pray at the three principle
A thousand years ago, in the heyday of the Japanese imperial court, royals and nobles would embark on weeks-long treks to pray at the three principle Shinto-Buddhist shrines at the heart of Kumano, a rugged swath of the Kii Peninsula in southernmost Honshu. Dressed in the white of the dead, they would pay homage to the smaller subsidiary shrines, or oji, that marked the way, as well as to the trees and rocks themselves. Trekking the Kumano Kodo, as the network of trails was named, was as much a purification rite as a celebration of nature. After years of obscurity following Japan's modernisation, in 2004 the Kumano Kodo received World Heritage listing, one of only two pilgrimage routes in the world with this title (the other is Spain’s Way of St. James). It has helped fuel a revival along the trail, restoring the tracks and temples and bringing money to Japan's ailing rural population. Kameya Ryokan in Kawayu Onsen, a 17th-century village on the banks of a mountain stream, uses herbs and roots from the forest floor in its nightly meals. It’s what the proprietor calls “pre-emptive medicine food”— salad with daikon and wild rocket, charcoal-hued soba noodles, fresh sea bream and squid, fatty cured pork, miso with seaweed harvested from the Wakayama coast, and sweet custard made from local mikan oranges.
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