Mount Myoko was added to Your Favorites!
Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan NP, Niigata
Claim this place to tell your story your way.
In the Edo period, villagers supplied bracken and fiddleheads to Myoko’s temple and, in return, gained rights to gather mountain resources. Those wild foods—including bamboo shoots—became local specialties and ingredients in sasazushi and bamboo-shoot soup.
For much of the Edo period, temple authorities strictly limited access to Myoko. The annual pilgrimage, on the 23rd day of the 6th lunar month, drew as many as 1,200 people in a day: they crossed slopes imagined as hell before reaching the summit, understood as Amida’s Pure Land.
Myoko’s summit once held an Amida triad modeled on the principal image at Zenkoji Temple. An Edo-period legend credited warrior Kiso Yoshinaka with dedicating it, but the central statue is dated to the late Kamakura period and the flanking figures are later.
Behind Sekiyama Shrine at Myoko’s foot stand 2 enormous rocks. They are thought to be pieces of a pyroclastic flow from the mountain, carried far downhill; researchers suggest people may have revered them as seats of the mountain’s spirit.
Sekiyama Shrine preserves a bronze Kannon believed to have been made in 6th-century Baekje, in present-day Korea. Its shape and copper composition support that dating; some scholars suggest it may have been a sacred image of Myoko before the summit’s Amida triad.
When women were barred from climbing Myoko, the temple’s healing spring—between today’s Seki and Tsubame hot-spring areas—was the mountain’s innermost place they could reach. It welcomed visitors of all ages and genders for healing and prayer.
One explanation of Myoko’s name reaches beyond the landscape: Myoko City says Shugendo practitioners may have named the mountain after Mount Sumeru, the sacred center of the Buddhist cosmos. Written records of the name appear by the Muromachi period.
In late May or early June, retreating snow can form the character 山 (“mountain”) near Myoko’s summit. The shape appeared on protective talismans as a sign of Myoko Nyorai, the Amida figure once worshipped on the peak.
As the snow retreats in May, a patch resembling a leaping horse appears on Myoko’s mountainside. The sight marks the quick advance of snowmelt toward the foothills—a seasonal detail recorded by the regional forestry office.
Myoko began forming about 300,000 years ago through 4 periods of activity separated by long pauses. Its youngest known eruption deposits are about 1,500 years old and came from a steam-driven eruption; no eruption has been recorded in written history.
Myoko’s volcanic foothills are home to 7 hot-spring areas, with waters described as having 5 different spring qualities and 3 colors. Their sources lie in the mountain’s South and North Jigokudani valleys.
At Sekiyama Shrine, in Myoko’s foothills, a summer fire festival continues a tradition more than 1,200 years old. Its stick-fighting performance by temporary yamabushi is joined by a pine-pulling rite, a shrine procession and sumo.
The Myoko thistle grows in beech forests of the Myoko mountain range and is endemic to Japan. Its many small flower heads point downward; the National Museum of Nature and Science notes that plants from Myoko have softer leaves than those from Shiga Highlands.
