S P O T ／ SPOT-023

Toribeno (Kyōto's Ancient Mortuary Plain)

鳥辺野（京都の古代葬送地）とりべの

The hills east of Kiyomizudera, now among the most visited tourist corridors in Japan, sit atop a zone that served for centuries as one of the capital's principal disposal sites for the dead. The area known as Toribeno — stretching from the base of Higashiyama through to Mount Amidagamine — was a site of sky burial, wind burial, and open exposure of corpses from the Heian Period through the early Edo Period, its landscape described in Japanese literature (the Tale of Genji, among others) as the quintessential entrance to the afterworld. The bones are, in a literal sense, beneath the souvenir shops and the matcha soft serve vendors. The Rokudō Chinkōji Temple on the same street marks what is known as "the crossroads of the six worlds" — the junction between the living and the dead — and its annual Rokudō Mairi ceremony in August is an active practice of summoning ancestors' spirits back from the dead for the Obon season. No other tourist destination in Japan carries quite this degree of necromantic subtext.