Test Your Kunisaki Love

What Is the Kunisaki Love Proficiency Test?

The Kunisaki Love Proficiency Test is an exam that measures just how much you love Kunisaki. Pass it, and you may — just may — gain the unshakable confidence that your love for Kunisaki is the real thing, and with it, the strength to live.

Practice Questions and Sample Answers

Here we introduce questions that are likely to appear on the Kunisaki Love Test, along with sample answers. Please note that the Kunisaki Love Test Association declines to comment on either the questions or the correct answers. By all means, think through your own answers. Meanwhile, the Association is also inviting submissions of your own sample answers and questions. If you’d like to send some, please use the message page.

What sort of person was Ninmon Bosatsu?

• Sample answer 1: Many different stories are handed down about Ninmon Bosatsu.
  For one, he is said to have founded all the temples and shrines of Rokugo Manzan in a single year, so he must have possessed considerable community-revitalizing power. When he first appeared on Mount Omoto, the birthplace of Usa Jingū, he is said to have trained his way across all the mountains of the Kunisaki Peninsula. Since this connects to today’s “mine-iri” and the “Mine-michi Long Trail,” he seems to have been quite a skilled tour conductor as well. And when the Hachiman deity of Usa Jingū took Buddhist vows and undertook religious training, Ninmon is said to have continued the austerity of burning his own body for three years — a Guinness-level feat of endurance. Even today, at the Shujō Onie festival, he still appears before the people in the form of a demon: a super-long-lived performer.
  
  In this way, Ninmon Bosatsu is not only the founder of Rokugo Manzan but a truly hardworking bodhisattva who turns up throughout Kunisaki culture — in ascetic training, in the fusion of gods and Buddhas, in festivals, and more.
  

• Sample answer 2: He is said to have founded the twenty-eight temples and shrines of Rokugo Manzan. This is legend, however, and recent historical research holds it as established that he was not an actual person. Still, imagining the background from which such a legend arose may be one of the ways to enjoy Kunisaki. For instance, the people who devoted themselves to Buddhist training long ago had no proper texts or curriculum, and may have been quite unsure of what training to do or what kind of monk to aspire to become. So perhaps they wanted an ideal of training, an ideal image of a monk. “Maybe he was like this,” “he must have been like that” — perhaps all those thoughts of the training monks gradually took shape until such a bodhisattva really did exist in their minds, and they came to train with him as their goal.

And what is Rokugo Manzan in the first place?

• Sample answer 1: It’s the collective name for the ancient temple complex spread across the Kunisaki Peninsula in Ōita Prefecture. The “san” (mountain) of “manzan” means “temple,” and the name came to be used in the sense of the many temples spread across the six districts (rokugo) of Kunisaki under the ritsuryō system. According to legend, the temples of Rokugo Manzan were founded in the early 700s by Ninmon Bosatsu. Around that time a temple called Mirokuji was also built within Usa Jingū, and together with the temples and shrines of the six districts, the area became known as a place where gods and Buddhas mingled — “shinbutsu-shūgō.”
  In short, it’s a handy phrase for when you want to sum up the culture of this peninsula in broad strokes.
  

• Sample answer 2: From the Yayoi and Kofun periods, this region already had lively exchange with the continent by way of the Korean Peninsula. Buddhism, too, arrived early, and seems to have begun forming a distinctive culture of gods and Buddhas, merged with the native tradition of worshipping Japan’s own deities. Legend has it that the temples of Rokugo Manzan were founded in the early 700s by Ninmon Bosatsu, but in reality such a culture existed long before that, and only later came to be called “Rokugo Manzan.”
  In short, it’s a handy phrase for when you want to lump together this peninsula’s history — so old that no one quite knows when it began.
  

• Sample answer 3: In its early days it seems to have grown out of the ties between Mirokuji, founded within Usa Jingū, and the temples around it. After that, through the Nara and Heian periods, it deepened its exchange with mainstream Buddhism, strengthening its ties especially with the Tendai school. It developed greatly from the late Heian into the Muromachi period, but amid the turmoil of the Warring States era many temples were lost or forced into abandonment. Entering the peaceful Edo period, the Buddhism, festivals, and customs that had blended into the life and landscape of this region’s villages and people were handed down as a new Rokugo Manzan culture. Many of the stone Buddhas, festivals, and mountain-village scenes we see today were born and nurtured in that current.
  In short, it’s a handy phrase for when you want to convey, more or less, the various strands of culture passed down on this peninsula.
  

A friend says, “I’ve got half a day free in Kunisaki.” Where do you take them?

• Sample answer 1: Then it has to be the ruins of Old Sentōji. Old Sentōji was one of the central temples at the peak of Rokugo Manzan, and at its height more than a hundred training monks are said to have practiced here. In the chaos of the Warring States period nearly all of its wooden halls were lost, and today only the stone Niō statues and stone walls remain — but precisely because no half-hearted restoration has been done, it’s a site that tests the visitor’s imagination.
  First, set the mood at the “Saigyō-modoshi” at the foot of the entrance with the Saigyō anecdote so common on Edo-period pilgrimage tours; gaze at the small stone Buddhas, and after a short walk begin climbing the long stone stairway that continues all the way to the inner sanctuary. Imagining the Nishi-no-bō ruins where many training monks once lodged, the solemn ruins of the main hall guarded by magnificent Niō statues, and the Yakuō Gongen, climb slowly up the final steep steps and you arrive at the inner sanctuary. Slip out to the left beside it and, beyond the woods, Mount Sentō and the sheer, Kunisaki-like ridgeline suddenly open up before you. Pass through the woods on the other side and you meet an overwhelming cluster of five-ring stone pagodas. Every one of them is a site that stirs the imagination.
  

• Sample answer 2: I would go to Futagoji.
  The reason is simple: everything that makes Kunisaki Kunisaki is gathered there. There are Niō statues, there are mountains, there are stone steps, there is a temple, and there are seasonal flowers. You can enjoy it without knowing the history, and the more you learn, the more fascinating it becomes.
  
  As an introduction to Kunisaki, I think it’s the finest place there is.
  

• Sample answer 3: I don’t go to the famous temples.
  I walk the gentle slope through the sawtooth-oak woods of the back hills, pass the shiitake-mushroom fields out of the corner of my eye, and pause at the ridgeline for the view of the Seto Inland Sea and Himeshima, taking a breather. Then I pass through the thickly grown virgin forest and come out at the inlet of the next village. Gazing at the seaside scene where sea and mountain meet,
  I’d say, “People have lived here for hundreds of years.”
  Because I believe the charm of Kunisaki lies not only in the famous sightseeing spots but also in the ordinary scenery where people have gone on living.
  

• Sample answer 4: I go to my own favorite mound.
  It sits in a secret spot a little way up the hill behind my house. It’s a rough, hard-to-walk mountain slope no one uses now, but until just a few decades ago it was said to be an important mountain path connecting to the next village. That Kōshin mound stands halfway up the slope, where a path from another direction crosses it. Long ago it probably served as a signpost too. In the quiet woods of the mountainside, gazing at the stern yet humorous face of Shōmen Kongō and imagining the thoughts and lives of the people of this region — that, too, I think, is a way to enjoy Kunisaki.
  

If you could meet Ninmon Bosatsu, what would you ask?

• Sample answer 1: Did you really walk all of it?
  (Ninmon Bosatsu’s presumed reply: “Well, uh, you see, um…”)
  

• Sample answer 2: Why Kunisaki?
  (Ninmon Bosatsu’s presumed reply: “Well, before I knew it, here I was…”)
  

• Sample answer 3: What do you make of Kunisaki today?
  (Ninmon Bosatsu’s presumed reply: “Well now, the young folk these days are doing a fine job too. Seems like an awful lot of meetings, though…”)