After half a century of travel writing, Pico Iyer reflects on the power of Koyasan, the temple-filled town at the spiritual heart of his adopted home, Japan
Fifty-one stations after leaving jampacked Osaka — the landscape growing ever quieter, the platforms ever emptier — you step out of your train at Gokurakubashi, ‘The Bridge of Heaven’. You get into a clanky cable car and, minutes later, you face a silent country road, with little on it but signs warning of bears. A slow country bus takes you into a settlement consisting of 117 temples, their grey roofs like the prows of ships about to sail off into the mist.
I urge every friend who visits my adopted home to spend two nights on the holy mountain. Walk through the cemetery at night and you can feel the spirits of ancient Japan. Once the light comes up, you can watch robed monks carry breakfast and lunch, every day, to the founder of the community, Kobo Daishi, who stopped breathing in the year 835, but is believed to be sitting still in uninterrupted meditation.
Days on Koyasan are like days nowhere else. Once, I took a walk with a monk who, only two years earlier, had been an office worker in central Osaka; now, having inherited a temple, he was spending all his days on the magic mountain. I enjoyed lunch every day in a funky cafe run by a young Japanese man and his French wife; they’d travelled the world and decided they wanted to raise their children in a simpler, purer environment, close to the elements.
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