After a week spent reacquainting ourselves with Tokyo, we took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Sendai early on a Saturday morning. Our first stop was the Sendai Mediatheque, Toyo Ito’s celebrated glass-and-steel cultural centre with tree-like structural columns bisecting the interior.

On paper it’s extraordinary; in person, the interiors had been filled with the kind of bland municipal furniture you find in any civic building. It felt like someone had taken a beautifully composed photograph and hung it in a cheap frame.

Lunch made up for it. In a small gyoza place on Ichibancho we ordered plates of Sendai’s signature bite-sized dumplings and fried chicken: crisp, salty, exactly what we needed.

From there we caught a local train west towards Yamadera, watching the city give way to countryside and then to wooded mountain valleys dusted with snow. Our plan was to visit Risshaku-ji (立石寺), the temple complex that clings to the steep rock face of Mt. Hoju (宝珠山). But we’d misjudged the timing. The temple closes at 3pm in winter, and by the time we arrived, the gates were shut.

We tried to salvage the afternoon with a hike nearby, but the trailhead was plastered with alarming bear-warning posters. Bold illustrations of Asiatic black bears in poses indicating that a gentle hug was not what they were after. In 2025, Japan recorded a record 230 bear attacks, with at least 13 fatalities. Tohoku (northern Japan) was the worst-affected region. A growing bear population, shrinking rural communities, and poor acorn harvests had driven the animals further into human territory than ever before. We decided discretion was the better part of valour and retreated to the station.

A short train ride east brought us to Yamagata (山形市), a modest city at the edge of the Dewa mountains, where we checked in for the night.

We woke to find the city blanketed in fresh snow. It felt like a sign. Yamadera was only twenty minutes away by train. I was going back.

Risshaku-ji was founded in 860 AD by the monk Jikaku Daishi (慈覚大師), also known as Ennin (円仁), one of the most important figures in Japanese Buddhism. He had spent nine years studying in Tang dynasty China and returned to establish this remote mountain seminary under an imperial edict from Emperor Seiwa (清和天皇). The temple was built to extend the influence of Kyoto’s great Enryaku-ji (延暦寺) into the rugged, largely untamed Tohoku frontier. It sits on the slopes of Mt. Hoju, its halls and prayer platforms perched on ledges of volcanic rock, connected by over a thousand stone steps worn smooth by centuries of pilgrims.

Within the main hall, the Konpon-chudo (根本中堂), a Buddhist flame is said to have burned continuously for more than a thousand years, originally lit from the sacred fire at Enryaku-ji itself. Whether or not you take this literally, I like the idea of a light maintained across generations, passed hand to hand through wars, earthquakes, and every century in between.

Yamadera is perhaps most famous for its association with the haiku poet Matsuo Basho (松尾芭蕉), who visited in the summer of 1689 during his journey through the north, later immortalised in Oku no Hosomichi (おくのほそ道, The Narrow Road to the Deep North). Standing in the stillness of the temple grounds, he composed one of his most celebrated poems:

閑さや岩にしみ入る蝉の声

Shizukasa ya / iwa ni shimiiru / semi no koe

Such stillness / the cries of the cicadas / sink into the rocks

In December, I heard almost nothing at all. Just the soft compression of snow underfoot and the occasional crack of a branch shedding its load.

The climb took about twenty minutes. The stone steps were slippery in places, packed with fresh snow, and the path wound upward through cedar forest. Every few turns there was a stone lantern half-buried in white, or a small Buddhist statue with snow collecting on its head and shoulders, hands still pressed together in prayer. The mist hung low through the trees, thinning and thickening as I climbed, so that the path ahead kept appearing and disappearing. It was very quiet. I passed almost no one.

Small halls and sub-temples clung to the rock face at intervals, connected by narrow stone paths and wooden stairways bolted into the cliff. Some were tucked into shallow caves, their dark interiors just visible behind weathered lattice screens. Others sat on ledges so narrow it was hard to believe anyone had thought to build there at all. Snow had settled on every roof and railing, softening the hard geometry of the structures against the grey volcanic rock.

Near the top of the climb, the path opens onto Godaidō (五大堂), the Hall of the Five Wisdom Kings. It is named for the five fierce protective deities of Esoteric Buddhism. The hall itself is modest: a small wooden structure perched on a narrow ledge of rock, open on one side to the valley below. You step out onto its platform there is nothing between you and the mountains.

The bare trees, the dark rock, the temple rooftops were all covered in white, and the surrounding mountains had become something extraordinary. Layers of grey and white receded into cloud, ridgeline folding behind ridgeline, each one paler than the last until they dissolved entirely into mist.

It looked, unmistakably, like a Chinese shanshui painting come to life.

Shanshui (山水) literally means “mountain-water” and refers to the tradition of Chinese landscape painting in ink wash that stretches back over 1,600 years. They evoke a feeling: the vastness of nature, the smallness of the human figure within it, what’s shown and what’s left out. In a shanshui painting, mist is not merely atmosphere. Mist is the void, the negative space from which mountains emerge half-revealed.

The great Song dynasty masters understood this. Their towering, misty compositions were not landscapes in the Western sense. They were philosophical statements about the relationship between humanity and the natural world, rooted in Daoist and Buddhist ideas of impermanence, emptiness, and harmony. To look at a shanshui painting is to be reminded that the world does not exist for our benefit. We are passing through it, briefly.

Standing on the observation platform, watching the clouds drift slowly across the valley, revealing and concealing the monochrome landscape in turn, I understood this with a clarity that no gallery visit had ever provided. The snow-covered mountains were not like a shanshui painting. The paintings had always been faithful to this: to the actual experience of standing in the presence of mountains and weather and silence, and feeling, for a moment, genuinely small.

Coming down the thousand steps, a little cold and thoroughly elated, I stopped at Tsuki Coffee (山寺南院), a small café near the station. I ordered a hot royal milk tea (ロイヤルミルクティー, a richer Japanese style where tea is simmered directly in milk rather than brewed separately) and sat by the window, watching the snow fall outside while waiting for the next train back to Yamagata.

It was one of those small interludes that make a trip. Warm hands around a cup. The satisfaction of having returned for something and found it was worth the effort.