The Kohechi — the pilgrim route no one walks

Photo: VKaeru, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The Kohechi is the pilgrim route the guidebooks tell you not to walk alone. It is also the only one of the four old paths that cross the Kii Peninsula in southern Japan where the regional tourism bureau will not let you start the hike without a reservation for every village you are going to sleep in. The bureau does this for a reason. The route is sixty-five kilometers long, has four mountain passes over a thousand meters, and runs through a region that sees, in the bureau's own words, “much rain, wind, and fog.”

I have not walked it. I have been reading about it for two weeks.

I want to be honest about that up front, because the writing that follows is not trip writing. It is the other thing. It is the obsessive-researcher kind of place writing that happens when a specific path in a specific mountain range quietly begins to take up more of your evenings than it has any business taking. The Kohechi has been taking up mine. The shape of the piece is: here is the list of passes, here is the Japanese vocabulary that earns the telling, here is the comparison to the three other Kumano Kodo routes that have been walked by every English-language travel blogger with a camera, and here is why Craig Mod is essentially the only person writing about this one in any depth at all.

Four passes, five villages

The Kohechi runs north to south, from the Buddhist monastery complex at Kōyasan down to the shrine of Kumano Hongū Taisha, which is one of the three grand shrines of Kumano that together form the pilgrimage's destination. Kōyasan is where the esoteric Shingon school of Japanese Buddhism has had its headquarters since the ninth century. Hongū is where the pilgrim, having walked for four days through the mountains, is supposed to arrive. Between them, according to the Tanabe City Kumano Tourism Bureau, the route crosses four mountain passes over a thousand meters: Mizugamine, Miura-tōge, Obako-tōge, and Hatenashi-tōge. Only the last is open year-round. The others are closed from mid-December to mid-March.

The word for each of those passes is tōge, and the word matters. Tōge is the old word for the kind of mountain crossing that has had a name in Japanese for as long as anyone in the valleys below has been giving it one. The loanword pasu belongs to the highway. The passes on the Kohechi have had their names since the route was formalized as a pilgrimage in roughly the thirteenth century. They are tōge, not pasu, and the decision to use the old word is itself the first piece of evidence that this particular path has been taken seriously for a very long time.

The overnight villages are Kōyasan, Omata, Miura-guchi, Totsukawa Onsen, and the Hongū area. Five villages, four nights, one route. The bureau's reservation-for-every-village rule is the mechanical safety net that replaces the infrastructure the route does not have. There is no village shop open after dark at Miura-guchi. There are, along the climb of the second day, two basic emergency huts, unstaffed and without amenities. If you do not arrive at the village you said you would arrive at, someone notices.

Photo: VKaeru, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The character at the front of the name

The name “Kohechi” is written with two characters. The first is 小, which means “small.” The second, 辺路, roughly means “route along the edge.” The small route along the edge. This is a joke, in the polite and long-arc way that Japanese place names can be jokes. The Kohechi is the steepest of the four pilgrimage paths on the Kii Peninsula. It is the one with four passes over a thousand meters in a sixty-five-kilometer walk. It is the most demanding of all of them, and it is called Small. The implication of the name, I think, is that compared to the scale of what the walker is doing — crossing between two of the most important religious sites in Japanese Buddhism, on foot, through the mountains — the path itself is small, the walker is small, the achievement is quiet. The route refuses to take credit for itself in its own name.

The other three routes do not do this. The Nakahechi, the middle route along the edge, is the popular one; it is the path every organized walking tour on the peninsula uses, and it was also, in the old imperial period, the one the emperors themselves walked. The Ōhechi, the great route along the edge, is the coastal one, about a hundred and twenty kilometers. The Iseji connects the grand shrine at Ise to the Kumano Sanzan, roughly a hundred and sixty kilometers. All three have a published infrastructure of English-language travel posts, tour operators, Instagram captions, and guidebook chapters. The Kohechi has, essentially, a warning on the bureau's website, a reservation requirement, two emergency huts, and one walker.

The one walker

In 2016, Craig Mod walked the Kumano Kodo with the photographer Dan Rubin, starting on the Nakahechi at Takijiri and switching to the Kohechi at Hongū for the walk north to Kōyasan. They made a book out of it — Koya Bound, eighty-four pages of photographs, no guidebook pretensions, “a set of visual poems” is how the book describes itself. Two years later, in April 2018, Mod walked the Kohechi again, mostly alone, and recorded an episode of his newsletter from inside the walk itself. Between the book and the newsletter, Mod is somewhere close to the entire English-language body of writing on the Kohechi route at any depth worth calling depth. There are travel-bureau pages. There are logistics posts. There are not, as far as I have been able to find, other writers.

This is the part that is genuinely strange. There are four UNESCO-listed pilgrim routes on the Kii Peninsula. Three of them have been walked and written about and photographed by every English-speaking traveler who passed through the prefecture in the last fifteen years. One of them — the steepest, the quietest, the one with the name that refuses to boast — has been walked, in English, in any written depth, by basically one guy. And he is a photographer and a walker who has built the last decade of his life around being the kind of person who writes slowly about paths.

Photo: Daderot, CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The Ōji are the ninety-nine subsidiary shrines along the Kumano Kodo network. The word means “princes.” Each Ōji was at some point a miniature branch-shrine where pilgrims would stop, pray, rest, and then continue. Not all of them are extant. Some are stone markers. Some are a foundation under moss. On the Kohechi, which is not the route with the richest Ōji infrastructure, the practice of stopping at each marker is more a matter of the walker's attention than a matter of the path requiring it. The stops are optional. The walker who does not stop is, by the lights of the route, not understanding what they are walking.

What I would look at if I went

I have a list. I made it before I realized I was writing this piece, which is how I knew the piece was forming. Miura-tōge, because it is the most remote of the four passes and the one with the fewest photographs published in English at any resolution. The monastery at Kōyasan at four in the morning, during the monks' first service, because every account I have read of the shukubō lodging describes the service as the reason you leave. The cedar grove descending toward Totsukawa Onsen, because that section is reportedly the oldest continuously used section of the route, and because walking through a stand of trees that has been a path for nine hundred years is one of the few things on the peninsula that cannot be replicated by any other walk on earth. The hot spring at Yunomine, because the Tsuboyu bath there is the only UNESCO-listed bathhouse in the world and the Tanabe bureau's photographs of it make it look like someone's bathtub, which is most of what I want from a hot spring.

Photo: Nekosuki, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

Whether I will ever walk any of this is not the point of the piece. The point of the piece is that there is a route on the map that almost nobody in the English-speaking reading audience has heard of, that the local tourism bureau treats with a kind of protective seriousness, and that the one writer in English who has walked it writes about it in the voice of somebody who understands exactly how unusual the path is and does not want to be the reason it becomes the next Nakahechi.

I have been reading about the Kohechi for two weeks. I have looked at every photograph of Miura-tōge the search index will surface. I have read the bureau's difficulty warnings four or five times each. Somewhere in that reading the route has become something other than a line on a map — it has become the one route I would walk on that peninsula if I were going to walk one. Not because it is the most beautiful. I have no basis for that claim. Because it is the one the guidebooks tell you not to walk alone, and the name 小 quietly agrees.