Everyone skips it, because it is in Yamagata and because it is a thousand steps. Both of those are exactly why you should go.
August. 8:20 a.m. and already 31 degrees. You have bought a bottle of water and you are about to learn that it is not enough.
The steps start under cedar trees, and for the first hundred it feels charming. At three hundred you stop talking. At six hundred you stop thinking. At eight hundred the cicadas are so loud they stop being a sound and become a kind of weather.
Then you come out at the top, and the valley opens up underneath you, and the noise is still going, and you understand a poem you have never read.
Yamadera — officially Risshaku-ji, founded in 860 — is a temple complex bolted onto a cliff in Yamagata Prefecture. Halls sit on outcrops in positions that look structurally impossible until you see the rock they are anchored to.
The climb is 1,015 stone steps and takes 40 to 60 minutes depending on how honest you are being about your fitness. It is not technical. It is just relentless, and in summer it is a genuine physical event.
In 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō climbed this on his journey through the north and wrote: 閑さや岩にしみ入る蝉の声 — "such stillness / the cries of the cicadas / sink into the rocks". It is one of the most quoted poems in the language, taught in every school, and standing there in August is the only way it has ever made sense to me.
At the top is the Godaidō observation deck, cantilevered over the valley, where everyone stops and nobody talks much. Then you go back down, and at the bottom you eat cold soba, which is not a suggestion but the correct and traditional conclusion.
Go on a weekday, start before nine, and you will have long stretches of it to yourself. Autumn is spectacular and busy; winter turns the steps into an ice feature and requires crampons, which are sold locally and are not optional.
The poem says stillness, and you are standing there being deafened by insects. That is not a translation problem — it is the point. Bashō is describing the specific silence you can only hear underneath a very loud noise: the moment the cicadas become so total that they cancel out and you are left alone in your own head. Japanese aesthetics has spent a thousand years on that idea, and you can get it in one climb, for free, in about ninety minutes.
- Founded in 860 by the monk Ennin. The main hall at the bottom has a flame said to have been carried from Kyoto and kept burning ever since.
- Bashō's journey here became 奥の細道 (Oku no Hosomichi, "The Narrow Road to the Deep North"), the most famous travel book in Japanese literature.
- There is a rule that you should not talk on the way up. Almost nobody manages it, and almost everybody goes quiet after step 500 anyway.
Getting there
JR Senzan Line to Yamadera Station — about 20 minutes from Yamagata city, roughly an hour from Sendai. The trail entrance is a five-minute walk from the station and impossible to miss. Small entry fee at the gate.