Mount Osore
Interesting facts
- Gold-rich deposits found in the hot-spring sediments at Osorezan contain more than 400 grams of gold per tonne in places, among the highest grades known anywhere.
- The gold has never been mined: it was found only after the area became a quasi-national park, and in 2007 it was named a notable Japanese geosite.
- The mountain's older name was Usori, probably borrowed from the Ainu language and only later reshaped to sound like the Japanese word for dread.
- The name Usori already appears in Heian-period writings, including the Konjaku Monogatari collection of tales compiled almost a thousand years ago.
- According to the temple legend, Ennin dreamed while studying in Tang China of a sacred mountain thirty days journey east, and set out to find it.
- The itako mediums do not live at the mountain but travel in for the festivals, and spirit-calling at Osorezan only began after the Second World War.
- Visitors leave small cairns of stones and colourful pinwheels across the barren ground, offerings associated with the souls of children who died young.
- The writer Kōda Rohan visited in 1892 and described an eerie white landscape where pilgrims chanted for the dead beside pools named after Buddhist hells.
- Sulphur mining around Lake Usori, once treated as a military secret because sulphur went into gunpowder, finally ended in 1969 when oil refining made it worthless.
- Hot springs rise inside the temple precinct itself, and simple wooden bathhouses there have served pilgrims since at least the nineteenth century.
Why it is worth it
Mount Osore, Osorezan, "the fearsome mountain", is a volcanic caldera at the heart of the Shimokita Peninsula, the axe-shaped northern tip of Honshu in Aomori Prefecture. Inside it lies a landscape that Japanese tradition has long identified as a gateway to the afterlife: bare grey rock stained yellow with sulphur, steaming vents, the smell of volcanic gas, and beyond them Lake Usori, a caldera lake with highly acidic water. A small brook running into the lake is likened to the Sanzu, the river that souls of the dead must cross.
The Osorezan range is a group of eight somma volcanoes whose highest summit, Mount Kamafuse, reaches 878 metres. The last magmatic eruption took place more than ten thousand years ago, but fumaroles remain active. In the Meiji period sulphur was mined here for gunpowder, though the venture proved unprofitable because of the remoteness of the site. Within the caldera stands Bodai-ji, a Sōtō Zen temple dedicated to Jizō, the bodhisattva who protects the souls of children and travellers. By tradition it was founded by the monk Ennin in 862; it was abandoned in 1457 and revived in 1530.
Mount Osore is one of several places in Japan identified in folklore as an entrance to the underworld, and it is also known for the itako, traditionally blind female mediums who are said to call the spirits of the departed and speak with their voices. They gather at the temple during the Itako Taisai, a great festival held twice a year, in summer and autumn.
Getting there
Mount Osore lies about 8 km from Mutsu, the main town of the Shimokita Peninsula; Shimokita Station on the JR Ōminato Line is the railway gateway, with a road climbing to the caldera. The nearest airport in a straight line is Hakodate Airport (HKD) in Hokkaido, about 60 km away across the Tsugaru Strait; by land the usual route is from Misawa Airport (MSJ) via Misawa and Noheji by train to Shimokita.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Mount Osore is the name of a Buddhist temple and folk religion pilgrimage destination in the center of remote Shimokita Peninsula of Aomori Prefecture, in the northern Tōhoku region of northern Japan. The temple is located in the caldera of an active volcano and is believed in Japanese mythology to be one of the gates to the underworld.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
41.27900, 141.12000per Wikidata