Fifty-one stations after leaving jampacked Osaka — the landscape growing ever quieter, the platforms ever emptier — you step out of your train at Gokurakubashi, ‘The Bridge of Heaven’. You get into a clanky cable car and, minutes later, you face a silent country road, with little on it but signs warning of bears. A slow country bus takes you into a settlement consisting of 117 temples, their grey roofs like the prows of ships about to sail off into the mist. You’ve entered the single most powerful spot
