The Kumano Kodo appears on every list of Japan’s great walks. UNESCO listing since 2004 has highlighted its cobblestone paths and cedar canopies in global travel magazines for decades. Thousands arrive each year with hiking poles and carefully researched itineraries leaving with genuinely beautiful photos and a collage of stamps without capturing Kumano Kodo’s spiritual meaning.

The Kumano Kodo was not built for hikers. It was created by pilgrims. The difference is one of intention and inner orientation. To get the most out of Kumano Kodo you must allow the mountains to take something from you.

To understand Kumano Kodo’s spiritual meaning, you have to go back much further than the soothing Instgram reels and detailed trail maps, even past Emperor Uda (who made the first recorded imperial pilgrimage in 907 CE). You have to go back to Yomi.

Yomi — The Land That Pulled People In

Japan’s two oldest surviving chronicles — the Kojiki (古事記, 712 CE, “Record of Ancient Matters”) and the Nihon Shoki (日本書紀, 720 CE, “Chronicles of Japan”) — place the Kii Peninsula at the edge of Yomi-no-Kuni (黄泉の国): the shadowy underworld where the dead descend, a realm of transition beyond the reach of the living.

More specifically, the Kii mountains (Kumano range) were identified in early myth as Ne no Kuni (根の国) — the Root-Land — a threshold between the world of the living and the world below. As scholar Nelly Naumann establishes in her foundational study of the Yomi narrative, the journey into these landscapes carried a cosmological weight that long predated any formal religion: to enter these mountains was to approach the boundary between worlds.

The mountains here were awe-inspiring in every sense: overwhelming, charged with presence, demanding reverence. Ancient trees were understood to be inhabited by spirits. Waterfalls were worshipped as divine. The mountains were the literal abode of Kami (gods).

This was the beginning of the Kumano faithscape — a spirituality so rooted in the landscape of the Kii Peninsula that it could not be separated from it. People came to Kumano to make direct contact with the sacred in all of its animist splendour.

Buddhism arrived in Japan in the 6th century bearing new cosmologies — and Kumano’s aura absorbed them with grace. Rather than conflict, the two traditions merged: the gods of the mountains became understood as manifestations of Buddhist deities, and ascetic monks known as yamabushi (山伏) — those who bow down in the mountains — moved through the forest conducting elaborate rites, embodying their syncretic beliefs in nature-based prayer.

This fusion, called Shinbutsu-shugō, gave the Kumano Kodo its defining character: it was never one religion’s property. As D. Max Moerman, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Cultures at Barnard College (Columbia University) and author of the definitive English-language scholarly monograph on the pilgrimage, writes:

For centuries Kumano was the most visited pilgrimage site in Japan and attracted devotees from across the boundaries of sect (Buddhist, Daoist, Shinto), class, and gender… Kumano was thus both a real place and a utopia: a non-place of paradise or enlightenment.”