Suwa Taisha

Suwa Taisha.

Four shrines, scattered around a single lake in the mountains of central Japan.

For more than thirteen hundred years, people have gathered here to pray. But the worship of this place is older still — older than written history. Older than language.

Suwa is one of the rare shrines in Japan that holds no main hall. The mountain itself is the deity. The trees, the wind, the silence between footsteps — these are what people come to meet.

Once every six years, in the years of the tiger and the monkey, eight enormous fir trees are felled in the forest. Local people, by hand and rope, drag them down the slopes and raise them at the four corners of the shrines. This is the Onbashira festival. It has been done this way for over twelve hundred years.

People still die in this festival. Riding the logs as they slide down the mountain. They know the risk. They go anyway.

Walk slowly through the forest path. Lower your voice. Take one slow breath.

The wind that meets your breathing here is the same wind these mountains have been breathing for ten thousand years.

It is older than the shrine. Older than Japan. And it is, somehow, waiting for you.