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Ise-Shima NP, Mie
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An Azuchi–Momoyama-era pilgrimage mandala shows worshippers climbing Asama after visiting both Ise shrines, gazing toward Mt Fuji, and attaining paradise. Ise Ondo called skipping Asama “half a pilgrimage.”
A 1159 sutra buried on Asama was copied for Ise Shrine official Watarai Masahiko on 14 August; records date his death to the next day. Mie historians think the sponsoring nun, Shinmyō, was probably his wife.
Families in the Ise-Shima area make Take-mairi to honor the dead at Kongōshōji’s Okunoin on Mount Asama. Some wooden sotoba memorials rise several metres, lining the path like a forest of family remembrances.
At Asama’s foot grows Asama-kona, a mustard-family green prized as a winter pickle. It needs 5–6 frosts to grow tender and flavorful; once, families mostly made it for their own tables and as gifts to relatives.
When the 1959 Isewan Typhoon felled trees on Asama, cleanup exposed clues to an underground archive: 43 Buddhist sutra mounds were confirmed nearby. Evidence dates their construction mainly from 1156 to 1186.
From 1925 to 1944, a cable railway carried visitors up Mount Asama. Its steepest section climbed 652 metres per 1,000 metres of track—then Japan’s steepest cable-railway gradient—before wartime restrictions halted service.
Pilgrims once left Kongōshōji with Asama’s own Mankintan, a traditional medicine. Noma family lore traces its recipe to 1394–1427; the “Asama-dake” brand grew so famous that imitators appeared.
At Kongōshōji, the red arched Renju Bridge crosses a lotus pond and symbolizes the boundary between this world and the next. Hundreds of water lilies bloom there from mid-May into September.
Utagawa Hiroshige included Asama’s busy pass teahouse in his “Famous Views of the Sixty-Odd Provinces.” The teahouse is gone, but its stone retaining walls still survive on the mountain.
A Japanese-endemic gentian carries Asama’s name: Asamarindō was listed in a 1932 flora as one of “Asama’s seven herbs.” Though the mountain has plants associated with serpentine soil, this gentian isn’t restricted to it.
