Koyasan Okunoin

The walk starts at Ichinohashi bridge, and the convention is to bow before crossing, because you are entering what Shingon Buddhists consider the residence of a living man. Kobo Daishi, who founded the school and settled Mount Koya in 816, is not held to have died in 835. He entered eternal meditation, and monks have carried him two meals a day ever since.

Two kilometres of path lead there through cedars that have been growing for six hundred years, past somewhere over 200,000 graves and memorial pagodas. This is the largest cemetery in Japan and by far the strangest. Warlords who spent their lives killing each other lie within metres of one another: Oda Nobunaga, Takeda Shingen, Uesugi Kenshin, the Shimazu. Moss covers most of it. Further along, the corporate section gets peculiar, with memorials shaped like a rocket, a coffee cup, and one erected by a pesticide company for the termites it has killed.

At the end is Torodo, the lantern hall, where more than 10,000 lanterns are kept burning and two of them are said to have stayed lit since the eleventh century. Behind it, across Gobyobashi bridge, is the mausoleum itself. Photography stops at that bridge and the rule is taken seriously.

Go at dawn, or go after dark. The path is lit at night by stone lanterns and almost nobody is on it, and the monks of some temple lodgings run guided night walks. Staying overnight in a shukubo, sleeping on tatami and eating shojin ryori without meat, fish, onion or garlic, is the way most people do Koyasan properly. If the two-kilometre walk is not realistic, buses run to the Okunoin-mae stop, which drops you about ten minutes from Torodo and skips the best part.