Osorezan

Every doctrine in this collection is an idea. Osorezan is a place you can drive to.

Mount Dread — Osorezan — on the remote Shimokita peninsula in Aomori, at the far northern tip of Honshu.

It's an active caldera. And what that means on the ground is this:

Sulfur smoke coming up out of blasted rock full of bubbling pits. Ground so acidic and mineral-stained that almost nothing grows on it — yellow, white, grey, red. The smell is overwhelming. There's an acid lake, Lake Usori, with a shore of startling white sand.

And across the volcanic waste, in every direction: thousands of small stone piles.

Cairns. Built by hand, one rock at a time.

With pinwheels stuck among them, turning in the sulfur wind.

The stones are for children

That's what stops you.

In Japanese folk Buddhism there's a riverbank called Sai no Kawara, where the souls of children who died before their parents are said to go. And their task there is to build stone towers as merit for the parents they left behind.

And demons come and knock the towers down, and the children start again.

Until Jizō arrives. The bodhisattva who walks the borders of hell looking for exactly these children — and who hides them in his sleeves and carries them through.

That's why he is the most beloved figure in Japanese religion, and why his statues stand at roadsides and boundaries all over the country, dressed in red bibs and knitted caps left by mothers.

Osorezan is that riverbank, identified with a real landscape, and the stones are placed by parents.

Some of the pinwheels are new. People bring them because children like them, and because you cannot bring anything else.

The geography preaches

The identification isn't loose. The place is read as the doctrine, feature by feature.

The sulfur waste is hell — and it looks it, without any help.

The white shore of Lake Usori is the far bank. The paradise side.

And you cross from one to the other by walking. There's a path. It takes about twenty minutes.

The pilgrimage is the doctrine, performed with your feet.

Even the name is a transmission artifact: it's thought to be Ainu in origin, bent phonetically into Japanese until it landed on osore — dread. The mountain was named by one people and re-heard by another.

Bodai-ji, the Sōtō Zen temple on the site, has a founding tradition going back to 862. It administers the landscape.

Hell as a parish.

And then there are the itako

This is the part I want to write carefully.

The itako are mediums — traditionally blind women, who underwent a long and severe apprenticeship, learning enormous bodies of oral text by heart, and who channel the dead.

Twice a year, at the Osorezan festivals, they set up in tents.

And grieving families queue.

Not to hear folklore about contacting the dead. To contact the dead. Parents who lost children. Widows. People who came a long way to sit down in front of an old blind woman and hear a voice they recognize.

I don't know what happens in those tents and I'm not going to pretend to.

What I do know is that it is among the most serious things anyone in this tradition does, and that it is ending. The itako were always few. The apprenticeship was brutal and the profession was one of the few open to blind women in rural Japan, which is no longer the case, and there is no reason for anyone to enter it now.

The last generation is elderly.

Of all the real addresses

This collection has a surprising number of places you can actually visit. A severed head's mound between skyscrapers in Tokyo. A well at Himeji where a servant counts to nine. A waterfall where a spider-woman lives. A stretch of coast where the lights come out over the water.

Osorezan is the one that stands above them.

Not because it's the strangest. Because it's the one where the folklore isn't entertainment and never was — where the landscape happens to look exactly like the afterlife people were already describing, and so they went there with their grief, and they are still going.

If you visit, the correct register is quiet.