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Daisen-Oki NP, Tottori
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“Thrown-in Hall” is the literal sense of Nageiredo: temple legend says En no Gyoja tossed it into the cliff cave. Tree-ring dating places its timber in 1086–1184, but how it was built there remains a mystery.
Nageiredo occupies a natural pocket where lava meets volcanic tuff breccia. Softer breccia forms its cliff-side footing; column-jointed lava projects overhead like a rock awning—geology made part of the architecture.
Mitoku tofu and sticky tochi (horse-chestnut) cakes star in the mountain’s shojin cuisine. In the Edo period, Rinkoin also served as a dining stop for Tottori’s Ikeda lords—a pilgrim meal with a lordly past.
Mount Mitoku’s founding legend begins with 3 lotus petals: the ascetic En no Gyoja tossed them skyward, asking them to land where deities had ties. One fell at Mitoku; temple tradition says the others reached Ishizuchi and Yoshino.
Around 420 m, beech and evergreen oak grow side by side. Beech forests usually begin around 500 m here, and a Tottori ranger notes that this connected deciduous-to-evergreen forest transition is found only at Mitoku and Sandankyo in the Chugoku region.
At the temple’s monthly prayer gathering, the meal ends with a different rice porridge for each month: lotus-seed in July, chrysanthemum in September, tochi-mochi in November, and soba in December.
Mount Mitoku’s Mikoshi procession was revived in 2006 after about a 50-year pause. Around 200 people gather around a distinctive hexagonal palanquin, carrying the mountain’s sacred procession toward Misasa’s hot-spring town.
At Mitoku’s autumn fire festival, conch horns accompany yamabushi as they burn prayer sticks; participants then cross the embers barefoot. The Shugendo rite turns an old mountain practice into a communal prayer for health and wishes.
A 1.15 m standing wooden statue of Zaō Gongen associated with Mitoku is counted among Japan’s oldest examples of this esoteric deity. Its mysterious, unusually calm expression contrasts with the fierce protector it represents.
Fossils from the Mitoku River valley include two recognized late-Miocene plant groups: the Mitoku-type and Misasa-Nari assemblages. Their broad-leaved and conifer fossils preserve a remarkable record of ancient Japanese vegetation.
A stone pillar at about 420 m marks the halfway point to Nageiredo: the route is 8 chō, and the marker reads 4 chō. Its Sanskrit character represents Jizō, the bodhisattva invoked for protection on the way.
The Ministry of the Environment lists golden eagles, broad-billed rollers and ruddy kingfishers among the birds found in Mitoku’s protected native forest—a striking cast of neighbors for this ancient mountain sanctuary.
