Kohechi (Mountain Route)

Kōyasan to Kumano Hongu Taisha · the mountain route of the Kumano Kodo

Part of the Kumano Kodō.

The Kohechi (小辺路) runs between the two sacred centres of the Kii Peninsula: 63 km from Kōyasan south to Kumano Hongu Taisha, crossing three passes above 1,000 m. Four days, with the nights at the river-valley settlements of Omata, Miura-guchi and Totsukawa Onsen. It is one of the four routes of the Kumano Kodo, inscribed by UNESCO in 2004 as part of the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range.

Key Facts

Overview of the Kohechi, Kōyasan to Kumano Hongu Taisha.

Distance	63 km (the four measured stages sum to 63.2 km; the walked line itself is 64.3 km)
Typical duration	4 days (range 3–5)
Topology	Linear
Difficulty	Expert
Countries	Japan
Elevation range	70–1,344 m (total ascent 3,500 m, descent 4,280 m)
Start	Kōyasan (830 m)
End	Kumano Hongu Taisha (80 m)

Elevation Profile

Ascent, descent and every high and low point on this page are sampled from the SRTM 30 m digital elevation model at each of the walked line's 2,986 vertices, with a 20 m threshold so the model's own noise is not counted as climbing. The model reads 1,329 m where the line crosses Obako-dake, against the 1,344 m OpenStreetMap records for that summit.

Stages

Every stage distance is measured on the walked line between that stage's own two anchors, because this dataset holds no guidebook figure for these four days. Each anchor is pinned to an OpenStreetMap node or way and the measurement is recorded in stages.json. No single day carries the effort the corpus calls expert, but the four together — three passes above 1,000 m, 3,500 m of ascent and 4,280 m of descent, walked on consecutive days — do, which is why the route is expert and its days are hard.

Interior Journey

The narrative and reflection prompt for each stage below are editorial writing, grounded only in what the stage contains — its settlements, passes, distance and climb. All four stages have been reviewed against that evidence, stage 4 twice over, because its reflection was rewritten during the first review and needed a reader who had not written it. See docs/review/kumano-kodo.md for the checks, and docs/data-sources.md for what is, and isn't, independently sourced.

Stage 1 Kōyasan → Omata 16.7 km · Onto the ridge

The day leaves Koyasan's temple lodgings, climbs to the ridge and stays on it: 16.7 km with its low point at 650 m. It passes Otaki, crosses below the summit of Mizugamine — 1,161 m, with the trail itself at about 1,030 m — and comes down through Kitaimanishi to Omata on the river. It climbs 710 m and descends 840 m, so the day's weight is in its length rather than in any one climb.

The climbing here is spread across the whole day rather than gathered into one pass — what does that ask of you?

Stage 2 Omata → Miura-guchi 13.1 km · The high point

The shortest day on the route is also the highest. From Omata the trail climbs past the site of the Kaya-goya hut to Obako-dake at 1,344 m, the highest ground the Kohechi crosses, then descends past the remains of the Mizugamoto tea house to the river settlements of Bitadani and Imoze. It loses 1,140 m against the 760 m it gains.

The highest ground on the route comes on its shortest day — is that a gift or a warning?

Stage 3 Miura-guchi → Totsukawa Onsen 18.8 km · Pass and river

The longest day: 18.8 km from Imoze over Miura-toge and then down the Totsukawa. The climb gains about 700 m from the valley floor to the pass at about 1,070 m, where there is a rest place and a public toilet; the descent runs through Nishinaka, past Kawai-jinja, and then some 8 km along the river road through Tamagaito, Nagai and Shigesato. It ends at the Hatenashi settlement trailhead, where the climb to the last pass begins, with Totsukawa Onsen a kilometre east across the river.

Half of this day is mountain path and half is river road — does the walking change when the surface does?

Stage 4 Totsukawa Onsen → Kumano Hongu Taisha 14.6 km · The last pass

The biggest climb of the four days: 1,080 m of ascent in 14.6 km, from the Totsukawa up to Hatenashi-toge at about 1,070 m. The way up goes through Hatenashi, past two World Heritage stone markers and a stone Buddha, then the Yamaguchi tea-house remains and a Kannon temple, before the long drop to Yagio. The last 2.2 km are shared with the Nakahechi, past Haraido-oji, into Kumano Hongu Taisha.

The other three days ended at a place to sleep; this one ends where the route was going — what changes in the arriving?

Waypoints

35 waypoints, every one enriched from OpenStreetMap and carrying its osmId, so a re-run of the enricher reproduces the file exactly. None are hand-curated yet. Each has a stageIndex and a kmFromStart.

Waypoint counts by type on the Kohechi.

Type	Count
Accommodation	9
Food (restaurant/café)	2
Transport (bus/train)	8
Supply (convenience/toilet)	10
Sacred sites	5
Cultural sites	1
Total	35

Nineteen of the 35 stand in Kōyasan, inside the first kilometre of a 16.7 km day, because that is where the buildings are; the mountain in between holds a few toilets and bus stops and nothing else. The far end is thinner than it should be. The corridor searched for places is measured against route.geojson, this section's own relation, which runs out before the shrine: the final 1.78 km of the walked line falls outside that corridor, so the shrine precinct itself — Haraido-oji, the bus stop at the gate, the last shop — contributes nothing here. Sixteen OpenStreetMap features lie in that gap; searching it would leave the file eight larger, once the enricher's own duplicate and unnamed-place filters have had their say. Help fill it in.

Geometry

The walked line is cut from two OpenStreetMap relations: 17131166, the Kohechi, and 17094646, a Nakahechi relation. The second is pinned deliberately. The Kohechi's own relation stops before Kumano Hongu Taisha, because the final approach is tagged into the Nakahechi where the two routes converge on the shrine; the join is a shared node, so the pair forms one connected path and the last 2.2 km of this route are the ones the Nakahechi also walks.

Tradition

Primary faith: Shinto, syncretic with Buddhism and with Shugendo mountain asceticism

The Kohechi connects Kōyasan, the monastic complex founded on Mount Kōya, with Kumano Hongu Taisha, the head shrine of the three Grand Shrines of Kumano. It is the mountain route among the four Kumano Kodo routes: its high point of 1,344 m stands above the 870 m of the Nakahechi and the 647 m of the Iseji, the only other two this dataset carries.

UNESCO status: World Heritage Site — “Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range” — inscribed 2004.

Files & CDN

The complete dataset lives at routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/:

Per-route data files for the Kohechi.

File	Contents
metadata.json	Overview, tradition, logistics, and provenance
route.geojson	Full-resolution route geometry — 3,061 points
route.main.geojson	The walked line the stages are cut from — 2,986 points
route.gpx	GPX 1.1 track for GPS apps and devices — 3,061 points
stages.json	4 stages, with interior journey narratives
waypoints.geojson	35 waypoints, all from OpenStreetMap

Available via jsDelivr CDN:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/metadata.json
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/route.geojson
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/route.gpx
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/stages.json
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/kumano-kodo-kohechi/waypoints.geojson

Route ID: kumano-kodo-kohechi