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Chubu-Sangaku NP, Toyama
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A repair uncovered a gilded-copper plaque dated 1524 in the summit shrine’s ridge beam. Even older pilgrimage traces—a fragment of a sutra-container from the 12th–13th century—were found along the route up.
In Tateyama’s founding legend, young Ariyori chased a white hawk and a bear into a cave, where he found his arrow lodged in Amida Buddha. The tale says the animals were divine manifestations guiding him to open the sacred mountain.
When the summit shrine was rebuilt in 1996 after 136 years, its sacred object was carried back from a temporary shrine on nearby Mt Ōnanjiyama. Conch shells and drums sounded across the 3,000-m peaks during the ceremony.
The shrine stands on Mt Oyama at 3,003 m—but Tateyama’s highest point is nearby Mt Ōnanjiyama, at 3,015 m. So the celebrated summit sanctuary is close to, but not on, the ridge’s highest peak.
Women were barred from ascending Tateyama until 1872. At Ashikuraji, a foothill village, the Nunobashi Kanjō rite offered women a spiritual path to salvation; after crossing the bridge, they looked up at the sacred mountain.
At the height of Tateyama’s pilgrimage era, as many as 6,000 people are said to have climbed in a single summer. The journey was a multi-day undertaking, guided from foothill lodgings toward the sacred peaks.
Ashikuraji’s 33 temple-lodgings sent clergy across Japan each winter to spread Tateyama’s faith. They used illustrated Tateyama Mandala scrolls to tell its stories, and carried pilgrimage maps and medicines; nearby Iwakuraji had 24 lodgings of its own.
Deep winter snow made the summit sanctuary difficult to reach, so rites could continue at the lower Maetate Shadan. Together with the middle shrine at Ashikuraji, it forms a three-part Oyama Shrine, with the peak sanctuary at its heart.
