
In the Boshin War’s aftermath, a common, derisive saying among the victors talking about the defeated, war-ravaged Tohoku region claimed that “North of Shirakawa, a mountain’s worth a hundred copper mon” (Shirakawa ihoku Issan hyakumon 白河以北一山百文). This began a depiction of Tohoku people in modern Japan as ignorant, potentially disloyal country bumpkins.
Of course, just like any part of Japan, Tohoku has plenty of which it can rightly boast, people and places alike. And to their credit, northerners have rolled with the Boshin victors’ saying and reclaimed parts of it as a point of pride since the Meiji era.

There are two particularly noteworthy examples of this. Sendai-born journalist Ichiriki Kenjirō (1863-1929) used it as the inspiration when he dubbed his newspaper Kahoku Shinpō 河北新報 (“North of Shirakawa News”) in 1897. It remains the major newspaper serving Miyagi Prefecture, and is still run by the Ichiriki family. Meanwhile, Morioka-born Hara Takashi (1856-1921), famed as the first commoner Prime Minister (heimin saishō 平民宰相) in the Taisho era, took his pen name of Issan 一山 (One Mountain) from this pejorative saying. Having seen and lost the Boshin War and endured the first wave of postwar discrimination, Hara used his status as a high government functionary to start ameliorating government discrimination against the people of Tohoku. And among the many mountains of which Tohoku can boast, the Dewa Sanzan– the Three Sacred Peaks of Dewa– are some of the most famous, and in their religious role, most sacred.
Table of Contents
ToggleA Remote Site of Ascetic Pilgrimage

The Three Mountains are divided between Tsuruoka City and Shōnai, a town on the north side of Yamagata Prefecture. Before the modern era, Yamagata Prefecture’s territory, along with that of neighboring Akita, was part of Dewa Province (Dewa no kuni 出羽国), from which the Dewa Sanzan gets its name.
The trio of peaks, Hagurosan, Yudonosan, and Gassan, have been a site of religious pilgrimage since at least the Heian era. The mountains have been dotted with an assortment of shrines, temples, and other religious structures since those days. They first appear in written documentation in the Azuma Kagami in an entry from Jōgen 3 (1209).
Getting to the Peaks
The peaks were truly remote. To people from closer to Kyoto, they might have even seemed to be in another world. Indeed, in those days, what we now call the Tohoku region had entered the Yamato court’s control only relatively recently. It was a frontier in the early Heian. By the late Heian, it was ruled by the Northern Fujiwara clan, who merged Yamato and Emishi roots of legitimacy to control the region as a semi-independent kingdom. By 1209, it was under the control of the Kamakura Shogunate. yet it was still hard to access. The roads going north– along with those that interconnected different parts of the region itself– were fewer and less developed.
As an Edo period saying in what’s now Yamagata had it, “Sendai and the nape of the neck are close but far away” (Sendai to bon no kubo wa chikakute tōi 仙台と盆の窪は近くて遠い). Understandable, in an era before modern highways and rail lines that cut through the mountains!
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It was this remoteness that made it especially fitting as a site of pilgrimage for ascetics. And it is the Haguro tradition of mountain asceticism– Haguro Shugendō– which is the local form of ascetic practice.
Getting to Know Haguro Shugendō
Shugendo is not limited to the Three Peaks. Some of its other locations, like Mount Koya, can be found in the Kansai region. It is an ancient, syncretic faith that harmonizes Shinto, Buddhist, and mountain worship traditions. Its practitioners are called yamabushi (山伏) — “those who are hidden in the mountains.” Shugendo encompasses a variety of practices including divination and what might be broadly termed as sorcery. Yamabushi train in part by braving the elements, under waterfalls and on mountain cliffs like those at the Three Peaks.
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In Haguro Shugendō, The Three Peaks are manifestations of different Buddhist figures. Haguro Daigongen is a manifestation of Kannon-bosatsu, Gassan Daigongen is a manifestation of Amida-nyorai, and Yudonosan Daigongen is a manifestation of Dainichi-nyorai. In a pilgrimage that started from Hagurosan, went through Gassan, and ended at Yudonosan, yamabushi went symbolically from birth, to death, to rebirth– or according to another interpretation, from the present, to the past, to the future.
There were once four major yearly rituals, one for each season, and called mine (“peak”). For a long time since the Meiji era, only the Aki no Mine (Fall Peak) and the Fuyu no Mine (Winter Peak) were still performed. However, more recently, the Natsu no Mine (Summer Peak) has made a return. In the Natsu no Mine, members of the general public climb the Three Peaks. Once a lengthy seventy-five days, the Aki no Mine is now but a week. During that time, yamabushi train on the Peaks and follow that symbolic path through birth, death, and into rebirth. Meanwhile, the Fuyu no Mine sees two high-ranking yamabushi emerge from a 100-day mountain seclusion that begins in late September and ends on New Year’s Eve. They then compete with what they’ve learned in this latest round of their training.
Dewa Sanzan and Date Clan Connections
My own introduction to the Three Peaks was through their presence in the Date clan’s history. While the Date usually lived in and ruled portions of neighboring Mutsu Province, and are famous as the daimyo family of Sendai, for a time, the family also controlled parts of Dewa. In the 1560s, the clan’s home castle was at Yonezawa, not far south of the Three Peaks, whose ascetics benefited from Date patronage. Perhaps its best-known appearance in Date history came in 1567. Date Chike Kiroku, the clan’s orthodox history, relates the following.
From the Date Chike Kiroku:
There lived an accomplished monk, the venerable Chōkai, who had studied esoteric teachings and had first called himself by the name Ensei. He was an ascetic who lived beside the Kameoka-Monjū pavilion in Nagai Manor, and engaged in rigorous discipline.
Lady Yoshi summoned Chōkai and ordered him to go to the sacred mountain Yudonosan, and pray that she conceive a child who would be skilled in pen and sword, and praised in loyalty and filiality. On the 2nd of the 4th month, he went to Yudono and prayed fastidiously. As proof of his prayer, he washed a purification wand (bonten 梵天) in the sacred pool there, and presented it to Lady Yoshi upon his return, putting it in place on the roof of the building where she slept.
One night, the lady had a dream where a white-bearded monk came to ask if he could borrow her womb. The lady replied “I must ask my honored husband’s permission,” and the monk nodded his assent and left. Awakening with a sense of wonder, the lady told Lord Terumune of her dream. He said “this is a good omen, how could I refuse? If you have this dream again, you shouldn’t refuse the monk’s request.”
The following night, the monk once again came to her in a dream and repeated his request. She consented, and the monk gave her a purification wand, telling her to carry it in her womb. She awoke, and it was not long after that she conceived. When the heir was born, Chōkai shōnin, inspired by the lady’s tale, suggested the name Bontenmaru.
Bontenmaru, the heir believed to be born by the blessing of the Dewa Sanzan and its peak of rebirth, became the daimyo we know as Date Masamune.
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Dewa Sanzan in the Meiji Restoration and Beyond
The Meiji Government, which came to power during the Boshin War of 1868-1869, made history with its radical shaking up and restructuring of almost every aspect of Japanese life. One particularly radical move it made in that regard was the Shinbutsu Bunri, a forced divestment of Shinto from Buddhism, which had enjoyed extensive syncretism for centuries prior.
Shugendō, which was a notable product of that syncretism, took the brunt of that policy. Authorities forced its practitioners to affiliate either with Shinto or with Buddhism– Tendai or Shingon sects in particular. This was in the words of scholar Gaynor Sekimori, “not demanded or welcomed locally.” Other religious affiliations subsumed Shugendō until the end of the Second World War. This is how Jakkō-ji, the principal temple on Hagurosan, became Ideha Shrine, part of the triad of shrines collectively called the Dewa Sanzan jinja. On its grounds still stands an old five-story pagoda, a testament to what was lost.

Shugendo’s Re-Emergence
With the new legislation brought about by the Occupation, however, those who had preserved the memory of the old ways, and had sought the means by which to perpetuate them, reestablished Shugendō, including at the Three Peaks, in 1946. Today, the head temple of the revamped Haguro Shugendō is Kōtaku-ji. However, restoration did not entirely return the places of worship on the Three Peaks to their pre-1868 form.
As Sekimori observes:
Shugendō seems to have found a firm place in modern religious practice, but it is highly unlikely that its institutional forms, destroyed at Meiji, will ever be recreated at Hagurosan.
And yet – even in modern form, altered by political necessity – this tradition and these peaks survive.
Some modern visitors to the Three Peaks are there for the ascetic training. Others are there for hiking, as the rugged terrain and trails are prime terrain for modern hikers. The pilgrims’ lodgings, the shukubō, now welcome tourists, and the grounds of the different shrines and temples around the Three Peaks have much of interest to sightseers, starting from the historic architecture. Particularly of interest in my view is the nearly 700-year-old five-story pagoda, one of the most notable remnants of the pre-Meiji days, which has been a National Treasure of Japan since 1966.
Some Closing Thoughts
The changes imposed from above notwithstanding, the mountains and their places of worship and training survive. Today, ascetic practices still continue on the Three Sacred Peaks. In non-pandemic times, locals welcome tourists. However, there are restrictions on photography (especially on Yudonosan) in some places. Although the exigencies of the Meiji Revolution forced it to change, Shugendō remains a living tradition, both in Yamagata and elsewhere.
And Haguro Shugendō, along with the Three Peaks, are proof that while the victors of the Boshin War may have claimed that all north of Shirakawa was worthless, the Tohoku region, its people, and its mountains have had plenty of which they can rightly boast.
They still do.
Sources
- Carmen Blacker. The Catalpa Bow: A Study of Shamanistic Practices in Japan. (Surrey: Japan Library, 1999)
- Timothy Bunting. “The Dewa Sanzan: An Introduction.” Accessed 15 November 2021.
- Frank Clements. “The Fall Peak, Professional Culture, and Document Production in Early Modern Haguro Shugendo.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, Vol. 46, No. 2 (2019), pp. 219-246.
- Date Chike Kiroku, Volume 2. Edited by Taira Shigemichi. (Sendai: Hōbundō, 1974), pp. 175-176.
- “Dewa Sanzan Jinja.” Yaokami.jp. Accessed 15 November 2021.
- H. Byron Earhart. “Four Ritual Periods of Haguro Shugendō in Northeastern Japan.” History of Religions, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Summer, 1965), pp. 93-113.
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- “Kōtaku-ji.” Haguro Kankō Accessed 15 November 2021.
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- Oka Yoshitake. Five Political Leaders of Modern Japan. Translated by Andrew Fraser and Patricia Murray. (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1986), pp. 86-87.
- “Philosophy.” Yamabushido: Back to Nature, Back to Yourself. Accessed 15 November 2021.
- Gaynor Sekimori. “Paper Fowl and Wooden Fish: The Separation of Kami and Buddha Worship in Haguro Shugendō, 1869-1875.” Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 32/2: 197–234. Archived at https://nirc.nanzan-u.ac.jp/nfile/2874, accessed 10 November 2021.
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- “Tsuruoka-shi shitei bunkazai ichiran.” Accessed 15 November 2021.
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