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Hakusan NP, Ishikawa
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The black lilies around Murodo smell strong enough to attract carrion flies—their main pollinators. A fly can leave with yellow pollen dusting its back, ready to carry it to another bloom.
In 1871, American teacher W. E. Griffis became the first foreigner recorded to climb Hakusan. He estimated the peak’s height by measuring water’s boiling point—and wrote that fleas at Murodo kept him awake.
In 1932, students from Hokuriku Girls’ School posed at Murodo in long skirts after climbing Hakusan. Organized women’s group climbs on the mountain had begun just 13 years earlier, in 1919.
On clear summer mornings, a drum sounds at Murodo’s Okumiya about an hour before sunrise. Hikers climb with a shrine priest to Gozengamine, where they welcome the sun together.
An Ishikawa prefectural food profile once recorded a distinctly local Murodo meal: Hakusan hard-tofu curry, candied Goro-jima Kintoki sweet potato, and Gensuke-daikon pickles—all served at 2,450 meters.
A letter posted at Murodo can get a special Hakusan postmark. Used since 1986, its design shows a climber on the mountain alongside Ishikawa Prefecture’s beloved black lily.
A botanist’s 1822 field map already marked black lilies growing beside “Hakusan Muro”—today’s Murodo. His book on Hakusan’s plants is considered the mountain’s first scholarly flora.
For young men from villages on the Tedori River plain, a Hakusan pilgrimage could mark a rite of passage, often before marriage. The 2–4-day journey climbed by the Kaga route and descended by the Echizen route past Murodo.
Since 1953, a summer medical team has worked from Murodo. Kanazawa University doctors and medical students stay at the lodge to help hikers and staff who fall ill or get injured.
“Murodo” joins muro, meaning lodging, and do, a religious hall. The current site once held the Echizen route’s pilgrim lodge—a place to sleep and worship on the way toward Hakusan’s summit.
The flowering ground around Murodo is also a restoration story. After camping and off-trail walking damaged plants near the lodge, Ishikawa began alpine vegetation recovery work there in 1973.
