Mount Nokogiri

We took another hike at Mount Nokogiri in the Chiba prefecture! Just to get to the mountain was a lot of fun. Instead of driving or using the train, this trip started with us taking the Tokyo Bay Ferry. It was about a 40 minute ferry ride to get across the bay. The boys loved it and it was a beautiful morning.

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It was a short walk from the port to a ropeway station where we took a gondola ride to get up to the top of the mountain. We started at the top and mostly worked our way down.

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We then arrived at a beautiful lookout spot. We were now 329m (1079 ft) above sea level!

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I didn’t get a picture of this, but the actual hike started off with a bagillion stairs (More like a hundred, but it was a lot!) to get to a small shrine and another overlook.

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From there, we headed back down the stairs and found a large buddha etched in the mountain, the Hyakushaku Kannon. Mt Nokogiri was previously a stone quarry, you could see as you walked where the stone was carved through and this buddha was literally carved into the quarry wall.

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From there you catch a glimpse of our next stop, Jigoku Nozoki, which means “View of Hell.” Kind of precarious looking, no?

Up we went, more stairs! We were pretty impressed at how well Jeffrey handled the stairs here. He seems to never tire! They had a little rest area up there and a place to take photos of the overhang.

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Then we headed down the mountain, more stairs and a lot of statues along the path. Apparently there are 1500 of these hand carved statues on this mountain. These are statues of “arhat”, which in Buddhism are people who have attained enlightenment or nirvana. During Edo times, creating these arhat gardens were very popular in Buddhist temples. All of the statues are unique and have unique facial expressions. We also saw many that were missing heads; there was previously a anti-Buddhist movement in Japan and many Buddhist sites were attacked and damaged. Jonathan also fell asleep during this part of the hike, it was kind of adorable.

This route took us to Ishidaibutsu, The Big Stone Buddha. This is the largest cliff carved buddha in Japan (31.5 m tall) and was carved in 1783.

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We stopped for lunch here and then to Jeffrey’s delight we found some frogs and tadpoles. Around the bottom of the giant buddha there was some water and there were a ton of frogs and tadpoles swimming around.

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After looking at the frogs for a bit, we continued down to the Nihon-ji Temple area. This temple was founded in 725 AD and is the oldest temple in the Kanto region.

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Instead of going back up the mountain to get back to the ropeway, we left the temple area and walked some quiet Japanese streets to get to a train station that would bring us back to the port to take the ferry back to Yokosuka.

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The weather was looking a little iffy on the way back to the port (we were warned in the morning that the ferry might stop if the weather was bad), but thankfully we made it back with 2 minutes to spare before the ferry left. The rain started as soon as we made it back to the car, woo! It was a good trip and our first hike with a group of friends.

BRB, Out to Japan – Jackie