Sessho-seki

Sessho-seki is one of the reasons Tochigi keeps coming up whenever the conversation turns to Japan's landscapes.

The legend says that a nine-tailed fox, having failed to destroy the imperial court in the guise of a court lady, was hunted down on the Nasu moor and transformed into a stone that killed anything that came near it. The setting makes the story easy to believe: the Sessho-seki sits in a bare volcanic hollow at Nasu Yumoto where sulphurous gas seeps out of the ground, nothing much grows, and the smell is constant. The area is called Sai-no-Kawara after the Buddhist riverbed of the afterlife, and it is filled with rows of small stone Jizo figures, worn and lichened, several thousand of them.

In March 2022 the stone split in two. Cracks had been visible for years and the break was natural, but it made international news, and the local tourism association held a memorial and peace ceremony for it. Both halves are still there. The site is free, sits above the oldest hot spring village in the area, and the walk across the gas field on raised boardwalks is genuinely strange.

The nine-tailed fox story that gives the stone its name is one of the more widely told legends in Japanese folklore, appearing in Noh theatre and later retellings across the centuries, and the Nasu version is generally treated as the definitive telling because the physical setting lines up so precisely with the narrative — a barren, gas-scarred hollow where nothing grows is exactly the kind of place a killing stone would be imagined to sit. The rows of Jizo statues across the Sai-no-Kawara slope were placed over a long period by individual visitors and pilgrims rather than installed at once, which is why they vary so much in size, weathering, and craftsmanship, some clearly quite old and worn nearly featureless, others newer and still sharp-edged. Standing among them, with sulphur steam drifting across the boardwalk and the smell of the fumaroles thick in the air, gives the legend a physical plausibility that a plaque and a rock alone would not manage — this is one of the few folklore sites in the Kanto region where the landscape itself does most of the storytelling.