Mt Hiei and the marathon monks, Kyoto

Mt Hiei just north east of Kyoto in late December

I didn't know until we were on the mountain that I would be coming into close contact with one of the world's great historical mountain endurance traditions. I had read about Mt Hiei's 'marathon monks' but never thought I would see the place - especially by accident.  In a gloriously incongruous transplanted cultural tradition I had been invited for a Christmas Day meal, sleep-over and long Boxing Day run by David, who I had only met once before - oh the joys of spontaneous sociability! Ohara was snowy and beautiful, and it felt like being at home back in Fukushima's mountainous Okuaizu villages.

Ohara morning - only 10km north of Kyoto

Run preparations were of Olympic standard. Well stuffed with the a western-style meal, refreshed with long conversations in English and slightly pummelled by David's great kids acting out their favourite animé scenarios, Boxing Day dawned with more snow. Let's get at it.

David heading up the first climb in Northern Irish  hard man style  - gear is for wussses

It was only now as we climbed gradually up the first hill in pristine shallow snow that I understood where we were going - over a couple of tops to Hiei-san. We would be running in the footsteps of the 'marathon monks.' Wow, I'm not worthy. Nah, not really, I'm too much of an egotistical sceptic to feel that. But it would be very interesting. We made the top of Yokotaka-san and made our way along the undulating ridge, ribbons of ice coating every twig, and a stiff breeze cutting over the hill. "It'll harden ye," said David with a wry smile. In a homage to Michael Jackson he had managed to come out with only one glove, and he explained that "It'll harden ye" is a stock response to any hardship in Northern Ireland, where they have known a few.

Ice decorations and David in his element on Mt Yokotaka

We were the only souls out - it is a normal working day in Japan, so we had the new-made world to ourselves, slithering, leaping and whooping down steep slopes. As we approached Mt Hiei David told me what  he knew of the place, that the Buddhist temple and it's army (yes, Buddhist mercenaries/soldiers, but if you think that is weird, check out the Yakuza scandal, links below), had got ideas above it's station and interfered once too often in the affairs of the capital in Kyoto, with the result that a large imperial force was sent in 1571. It encircled the mountain and neighbouring towns and then moved upwards, killing everyone (an estimated 20,000) and burning everything until it reached the top. Problem solved after a fashion. The temple was re-established, and the tradition of a gruelling discipline of mountain endurance and prayer resumed.

Part of the monks' prayer and endurance route

After exhaustive research spanning several minutes in the dusty tomes and darkened recesses of the internet, I have gathered the following. I'd take the details with a pinch of salt if I were you, as most sources say something slightly different and seem to be feeding off each other without looking at primary materials - and I'm doing the same.

They are sometimes called 'running monks' but this seems to be inaccurate. "Jogyozanmai" is translated on an information board I saw as "walking meditation" rather than running, and the films (links below) show fast walking  - so no, it is not that kind of jog! However, anyone who understands mountains knows that one person's fast walk is not the same as another's. The walking is incidental in that it is primarily there to gain access to the numerous prayer sites across the mountain. The difficulty of the Jogyozanmai lies not in its speed, but in its relentless succession of hard days in sets of one or two hundred, over seven years, amounting to an estimated 28,400 miles, set in the context of prayer and meditation, sometimes with limited food and sleep, no modern comforts, and all done in grass sandals through any weather and illness, come what may. Very few have completed it, though some have done it twice, and good runners are reputed to have given up after a week.

I have a feeling that English running greats Joss Naylor and Billy Bland would not have had a problem with it, mind you. Clearly, it is very different as even hardened mountain runners used to long distances have flexibility and fit their running around the pleasures of ordinary life, resting when they need to, and choosing when to suffer. It seems to be the unforgiving rigidity and emotional isolation - the intentionally soul destroying boredom even - of the Mt Hiei discipline that makes it particularly difficult - one day of serious illness and the whole thing is in jeopardy.

Jogyo-Do temple on the left, Hokke-do on the right, for walking, and walking and sitting training respectively. I'm looking for the cake eating temple

There is a wide continuum of human experiences that connect up with recreational mountain running and mountain asceticism. Both can span meditative thought, a quasi-spirtitual (in the sense of awe and wonder) relationship with the land and existence. Is there a point where both touch on the dysfunctional self (present company excepted of course) escaping the difficulties of ordinary life, or even a need for the kind of intensity that borders on self-harm? In case you think that is an exaggeration, the monks carry a rope and blade as in previous centuries they were supposed to top themselves if they failed, and the route is said to be dotted with the graves of those who have. Generally speaking when I fail to finish a run I have a little moan to my friends then go home and have some nice beans on toast - but then again, I am not enlightened. The long ordeal finishes with a 7 (or 9?) day sleepless fast where death, slash, enlightenment is hopefully approached. It used to be 10 days, but most people died so they shortened it, the softies. Imagine getting to the of it all end and feeling, well, no different? I know the Mt Hiei experience would not be for me unless all else had failed....erm...where do I sign? As David would say, "It'll harden ye."

Excuse me, is this the café?

Information on the marathon monks and Mt Hiei on the internet is patchy and often slightly contradictory: the truth is out there somewhere....
20 minute Australian video on the marathon monks
English documnetary (older film, different monk):Pt 1
Pt 2
A slightly wacky page on the marathon monks
USA today article 
The masacre on Mt Hiei
"The Marathon monks of Mt Hiei" is a book by John Stevens
Wikipedia page
Enryaku-ji temple and the yakuza scandal 
Warrior monks

Sacred forest: aren't they all?

The Kasugayama Primeval Forest World Heritage Site, hiking course and Wakakusayama, Nara City

A venerable citizen of Kasaguyama forest

Making a circuit round the back of a 498m hill looking remarkably like any other, it takes nearly as long to say "The Kasugayama Primeval Forest World Heritage Site hiking course," as it does to run it's 12.7km length, an easy blast on unsurfaced forest roads.

It's been said that this 'sacred' forest has been untouched by human hand since 841, when cutting was forbidden. Apart from the big forestry road that has been hacked through it.... Oh, and the metalled toll road and manned booths, the path made down to the waterfall, the Buddhist rock carvings and statues, and the usual signage? Yes, but apart from that. There are few truly primeval forests in the world, a word implying those that have never been felled or significantly affected by human hands. Perhaps a more useful term is 'old growth forest,' which acknowledges the absence of accurate history and concentrates on the state that the ecosystem has reached.


In a way, being told a mountain is 'sacred' or that a forest is 'primeval' sets you up for disappointment if you are approaching it as a jaded visitor looking for something deeper or more beautiful, some meaning absent from shallow modern life. It is sacred in the minds of those who feel that way about it, not in its actual form. A Japanese friend explained too, how because of the crammed narrow streets, the Japanese have evolved a way of looking at small patches of beauty and ignoring all the crowded dross around them. So there was me, running the route and pondering the contradictions, and then there was the solitary man clapping at a small shrine, placing his hands together and staring intently at the large tree above his head. We were seeing a different forest.

It's curious, this layering of meanings in one place, and a good example of how we each change things by looking at them. It can drive you crazy trying to grasp it fully, but it's good to at least know that it is there and very interesting to try and step outside your habitual way of experiencing things and notice others. Meanwhile, I was running.

Wakakusayama looking south: and how are you experiencing it madam?

On Wakakusayama there were families who had driven up on the toll road braving the brisk cold wind and the deer trying to bully them into giving up their food. There is a nice little diversion from the course on steeper tracks down to a small waterfall at the back of the route. The viewing platform was unattended but cluttered with hi-tech gear belonging to a film crew who were at the top of the waterfall discussing the next scene. They had left a pristine laptop and hard-drives on the bench, and a wooden bow. God bless their innocent little socks, only in Japan... and possibly Singapore...and maybe anywhere they chop your hands off for theft, I wouldn't know. To stretch a point, all different people seeing different forests.

And at the end, from the sublime to the cor blimey. I had to chuckle at the masses of pink love hearts with wishes on them at Kasuga Taisha shrine. But they were no more incongruous in that ancient place than a runner gawping around in black tights  - why is it the gear feels fine until you have to walk in it amongst non-runners?

Maps of the course are available from Nara Information Centres - handily the Japanese for hiking course is 'hiking course.' It's impolite to run in temples and shrines.

Hidden caves and a secret village...possibly

Unusual man-made cave hidden near the top of a small mountain - any guesses?

One of the great things about running in the hills is the unexpected, those little shocks to the illusory order imposed by our minds, the simplification and predictability we crave tickled into repositioning itself. No? That'll just be me then. The Yamashiro hills in Kyoto prefecture just north of Nara are modest and unassuming, but once you get into them, they have some refreshing surprises. I had been trying to find some new routes in this complex little area, but working out how it all fits together is not easy, and that makes for running fun. Trying to link up well used paths and starting and finishing points into good circuits means thrutching through some thick scrub on old hunters tracks, and sometimes loosing even those.

One of the more 'runnable' bits along a ridge

Taking an educated guess took me and my mate Richard down a steep hillside on a path that was probably made by wild boar, as it appeared from the goodly stink and a muddy wallow. After we had finished doing that we carried on. Luckily, just as the 'path' petered out, some unusual dry-stone embankments appeared in the woods, marked by red tape on twigs.

A long way from the nearest modern village up in the hills - there were lots of these

As we descended through a steep rough gorge more of these terraces appeared, some on the hillsides, and some apparently marking off flat areas. It felt to me that we had stumbled onto what used to be a hidden village, perhaps built at a time of war to hide from conflicts. If this was the case it was a good spot, as there was a water supply, and the bottom of the valley was protected by a rocky gorge, which though small, certainly wouldn't have looked to marauding soldiers as if there was anything up there worth plundering. As we stumbled out of the undergrowth, scratched but intrigued, and looked back, you would never know there was anything to see now.

Above this same area, coming from a different direction we happened across two caves at the base of a small sunken crag. I let Richard check out if there were sleeping bears in them first, it only seemed fair out of respect for his spirit of adventure, I'm very selfless that way. Each had been chiselled out and was big enough for two people to lie down in (or several to crouch in), and crude stone shelves had been carved out in each. Why were they made? Were they also hiding places, or were they graves? The chisel marks were quite sharp, so Richard wondered if they were WWII bomb shelters - yet we were far from any target, and the Americans deliberately spared Kyoto and Nara from the fire-bombs that destroyed most Japanese cities. Osaka is 40km away.

The second hidden cave

There is one man made cave about 10km away by a road, and in Saitama the Hiaku Anna (100 caves) are scattered across anentire craggy hillside. Yet no-one really knows what they were for either, though their guess of graves seems sensible  These caves were rougher and made in a hurry, but whether that was because of fear of an enemy, or the need for a local misanthropic boar hunter to bivouac regularly we'll probably never know. And I quite like it that way.

But what do you think we were looking at?