The secluded but
pristine Kumano Shrine BURRITT SABIN PHOTO
Today, most visitors to Kamakura
reach the former shogun's capital by rail. But the railway was not
blasted through hills until 1889, and in shogunal days travelers
arrived via the seven kiridoshi, passes cut through hills
as entrances to the city. Deciding to enter Kamakura like the
ancients, we took a bus to Asahina in Yokohama from Kanazawa Hakkei
Station on the Keikyu Main line.
Weathered stone images
stand along the Asahina Pass. BURRITT SABIN
PHOTO
The Asahina Kiridoshi had to go
through a hill in order to easily connect Kamakura with Mutsuura,
now in Kanazawa Ward, Yokohama, at the behest of Regent Yasutoki
Hojo in 1241. The pass was important, for Mutsuura was a center of
salt production and also Kamakura's outport, bustling with ships
from the Boso Peninsula in present-day Chiba Prefecture and as far
away as China.
Yasutoki personally supervised the
construction. He even provided his horse as a pack animal. From the
following year, 1242, salt and other commodities were carried from
Mutsuura over the Asahina Pass to Kamakura.
Yasutoki also had a strategic
purpose in building the road. The shogunate was at odds with the
Miura, a clan of Sagami Province (now Kanagawa Prefecture). In case
of war, Hojo-clan reinforcements from the Boso Peninsula and
elsewhere could disembark at Mutsuura and quickly reach Kamakura
through the pass.
A short distance from the bus
stop, we saw a sign pointing to Asahina Kiridoshi. Of the seven
passes, Asahina is said to be the one best preserved since the
Middle Ages. We were skeptical; arriving at the entrance to the
pass, our ears were assaulted by the whoosh of vehicles bowling
along an elevated highway and the clanging of hammers and whir of
machinery from a foundry. But we bucked up at the sight of a row of
hoary stone monuments.
Our eyes were drawn to a
koshinto,a stone monument reflecting belief in
koshin — a day in an ancient calendar when, during your
sleep, three worms dwelling within you emerge and report your sins
to the celestial god. Because this snitching was believed to
shorten your life, it was considered wise to stay awake.
The Chinese character for "shin"
is read "saru" (monkey) in Japanese;so many koshinto are depicted
by three wise monkeys. At the base of this koshinto they admonished
us to see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. The monument bore
the year Kansei 6 (1796).
The noise from the foundry abated
and, turning around, we saw workers, steaming cups of tea in hand,
observing us.
As the road hugged dun rock
fringed with greenery there heaved into view shallow grottoes,
resting places of the dead's ashes, yagura in the parlance
of Kamakura, where flat land was too scarce for burial in the
ground to be the norm.
We exchanged greetings with hikers
descending the road. Ahead a man lingered, as if wanting to talk.
We obliged. Yujiro Yamazaki, from Mutsuura, was reconnoitering the
Asahina Pass in preparation to serve as a voluntary guide for
seniors.
The road steepened between
palisades, which, together with the bedrock underfoot, disclosed
the pass had been scooped out of solid rock. But how was it done in
an age before any kind of mechanical power?
A signpost pointed to Kumano
Shrine, whither we directed our steps. We gingerly tread for 500
meters over a ferny trail skirting the brim of a ravine shaded by
tall sugi (cedar). Yamazaki judged, from the wide spaces
between them, that the sugi had been planted in the not-too-distant
past.
"Kumano Shrine was established in
conjunction with the completion of Asahina Kiridoshi," he
explained. "The deities of Kumano Sansha, the collective name for
three shrines in Wakayama Prefecture, were transferred to the new
shrine to protect Kamakura from the north, the direction of the
Demon's Gate."
There's another explanation as to
the origin of the shrine. Hojo Yasutoki (1183-1242), third regent
of the Kamakura Shogunate, is said to have enshrined here a
guardian deity in supplication for the successful completion of an
upgrade of the Asahina Pass.
For a place associated with
illustrious men, Kumano Shrine has few visitors.It is, after all,
remote and architecturally undistinguished. Neither, according to
Yamazaki, does it hold festivals. But it presents such a pristine
appearance in its sylvan solitude that I wondered what invisible
hand swept the grounds and touched up the facade and
signboards.
We broke out sandwiches and tea
purchased at Kanazawa Hakkei Station. Yamazaki recounted childhood
visits to the shrine, where he heard the bark of hunting guns as he
fashioned mouth harps and helicopters from leaves.
As we retraced our steps to
Asahina Pass, he pointed out more yagura and faults in the rocks
resulting from the upthrust of the land from the sea eons
ago.
Perfect path: Narrow,
and with sheer walls, the Asahina Pass was easily defended against
an invading army. BURRITT SABIN PHOTO
We climbed to the peak, the
Yokohama-Kamakura border, where holes in the rock face were
reportedly used as supports for a teahouse where men would have
savored a cup, lingered over their pipes, and flirted with serving
girls. The teahouse existed until the Taisho Era
(1912-1926).
Thereafter the road dropped
between mossy rock walls overhung with vegetation. Streamlets
purled at the shoulders or rippled in tiny cascades down the
stone-flagged center. The streamlets, canopies of branches and
water oozing from rocks kept the road cool and would have given
burdened men and animals respite from summer heat.
The call of an uguisu
(bush warbler) broke the silence. Yamazaki said the bird is a
harbinger of spring and that to Japanese ears its song sounds like
"hoo-hoke-kyo," a phrase from the Lotus Sutra, an influential
discourse attributed to Buddha himself.
He handed us binoculars and, after
much straining of the eyes, we sighted the diminutive songbird
perched on a branch. The olive-brown passerine, dubbed the
"Japanese nightingale" by English speakers, is unprepossessing —
better heard than seen.
Toward the end of the kiridoshi
there came into view a collection of large yagura on the scale of a
miniature of the Ajanta caves in Maharashtra, India.
Farther down, a bamboo pipe
conducted water from a spring to a roadside stream. This was the
Kajiwara Tachi-arai no Mizu (Kajiwara's sword-washing water), so
called because the warrior Kagetoki Kajiwara (?-1200) supposedly
washed in this spring the sword with which he killed fellow samurai
Chiba Hirotsune (?-1183).
We came to a small waterfall. Next
to its plunge basin stood a stone monument, erected in 1941 by the
Kamakura Young Men's Association to mark the entrance to Asahina
Kiridoshi. Its inscription recounts how the road was built in a
single night by the eponymous supersamurai Saburo Yoshihide Asahina
(1176-?).
The upheaval of land from the sea,
a road hewn from bedrock, tombs yawning in cliff faces, birds
warbling sutras — the wonders of the Asahina Pass were such that I
was ready to believe in a miracle by its namesake.