Yamagata: A journey of rebirth preserved in Japan's three holy mountains | BBC StoryWorks

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White is the colour that begins and ends life in a revered part of Japan’s Yamagata Prefecture. It is the first cloth wrapped around an infant and the final garment worn in farewell. And so it is, that white is the colour the pilgrims of the Dewa Sanzan don, as if returning to the ancient womb of the mountains, to be reborn as new wholes.

The Dewa Sanzan, Japan’s three sacred mountains, rise like a living trilogy of time: representing the present, past, and rebirth – the spiritual heartbeats of Yamagata. For more than 14 centuries, yamabushi (or “mountain”) monks have traversed these slopes in ascetic practice, setting out from the shukubo (pilgrim lodges) of Tsuruoka City’s Toge district carrying little more than their faith, breath, and a will to surrender to the mountains.

And while white may mark the beginning of this path, these mountains unfold into myriad colours. Breathtaking varieties of landscapes and uniquely fleeting sansai (mountain vegetables) that disappear as quickly as they sprout, watered by magnificent crashing clouds and nurtured by the tenderness of the seasons, defining the culinary soul of Yamagata.

In Nishikawa Town, locals hand-harvest these mountain bounties with a quiet devotion that seems to translate into every plate of their food, centuries of culinary culture bursting through the humble flavours of a single stem.
Experience it through the eyes of Andy Cheng, a freelance travel writer and chef, whose journey first begins as a search for the ephemeral sansai, but unravels into a deeper world of tradition, food and culture shaped by a generations-long relationship between the people of Yamagata and the mountains.

Yamagata welcomes you into the present, past, and future all at once, where nature's fleeting gifts remind us that the feeling of rebirth is not that of a single moment, but a generational cycle in which what we preserve today becomes the richness of tomorrow.

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