Shiromineji —
the emperor who became a tengu.

白峯寺 Shiromineji · Temple 81 · Mount Shiromine, Sakaide, Kagawa

Sutoku

Sutoku was emperor. He lost a war against his own family, and in 1156 he was exiled to Sanuki — to this coast, far from the capital, for the rest of his life.

In exile he copied out sutras by hand and sent them to Kyoto as an offering. They were refused and sent back, on the suspicion that he had worked a curse into them.

What is said to have happened next has shaped Japanese imagination ever since. He bit off his tongue and wrote in his own blood that he would become a great demon, that he would turn the realm upside down, that the emperor would become a commoner and the commoner emperor. He let his hair and nails grow and never cut them again. He died here in 1164 and was buried on this mountain.

Everything that went wrong in the capital afterwards — fires, plagues, the collapse of the old order — was laid at his door. He became one of the three great vengeful spirits of Japan. And in the tradition that grew around him he did not become a ghost. He became a tengu, the greatest of them.

Sagamibō

The mountain has its own tengu as well: 相模坊 Sagamibō, who stands with Chūjōbō of Yakuriji and Kongōbō of Zōzusan as one of the Three Great Tengu of Sanuki. Sagamibō is said to have served Sutoku and to have carried him up the mountain.

So the tengu of Mount Shiromine and the emperor buried on it are not two separate stories. They are one.

The poet Saigyō came here to Sutoku's grave to make his peace with him. Centuries later Ueda Akinari wrote that visit as a ghost story, and the mountain has carried the weight of it ever since.

What the place is actually like

Nothing about it is dramatic. It is a quiet mountain temple in old cedar, with a long stone stairway, a view down to the Inland Sea, and the imperial mausoleum set apart from the halls.

The quiet is the point. You are standing where the court put a man it could neither kill nor pardon — and where that silence was answered.

Stay longer than you planned.

Going there

On the Goshikidai plateau near Sakaide, reached by road or by the old pilgrim path from Temple 82, Negoroji. The stretch between the two temples is one of the loveliest on the whole route, and walking it is the right way to arrive.