The Religion the Road Was Built on, and What Dismantled It

The Kumano roads are usually presented as a scenic survival, but the tradition that made them a pilgrimage was deliberately taken apart by the modern state, and what walks them now is a partial reconstruction.

A combinatory faith

The Kumano deities were understood through honji-suijaku as local manifestations of buddhas, so the three grand shrines were Shinto and Buddhist at once, and the road was walked by monks, retired emperors, women and commoners together. The phrase describing the Kumano pilgrimage of the ants records a road so continuously full that it resembled an ant trail. This was a single combinatory religion, not two traditions sharing a path.

Two collapses

The Meiji government forced the separation of Shinto and Buddhism from 1868, dismantling the very combination the route expressed, and twentieth-century road building then made the shrines reachable without walking at all. The walking revival dates only from the 1990s and accelerated after the World Heritage inscription in 2004, when Kumano and the Camino established a joint dual-pilgrim certificate. The landscape is continuous; the religious world that gave the road its meaning was interrupted and has been only partly restored.