The story belongs to the deepest layer of Japanese cosmogony. Izanagi and Izanami were the divine couple who created the islands of Japan and the gods who inhabited them. When Izanami died in the fire of Kagu-tsuchi's birth, Izanagi descended into Yomi, the land of the dead, to retrieve her. She told him not to look. He looked. He saw her corpse crawling with maggots and thunder gods, and he fled in horror. Izanami, furious at the betrayal, pursued him to the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead. Izanagi rolled a massive boulder across the entrance and sealed it. According to the Nihon Shoki, this is that boulder. The shrine area has no actual buildings that house the kami -- the object of veneration is the massive rock itself, worshipped as it has been for millennia: raw, unadorned, and open to the sky.

The shrine complex at Hananoiwaya dates back to the Paleolithic era, though the first written record appears in 720 AD during the Nara period. Notably, Hananoiwaya is not mentioned as a shrine in either the Kojiki or the Engishiki -- Japan's oldest historical record and its medieval legal code. In those texts, it appears as the name of a cemetery. The designation as a shrine came during the Meiji period, when Japan's government systematized Shinto practice. But the veneration of the rock long predates any official classification. The cave at its base measures roughly six meters high and two and a half meters wide -- a modest opening in the face of an enormous cliff. That this small cavity became identified as the gateway between worlds speaks to the power of place in Japanese spiritual geography: some landscapes demand explanation, and the explanation becomes sacred.

Hananoiwaya is a place where Shinto and Buddhism have overlapped for centuries. The 10th-century priest and poet Zoki, in his pilgrimage account, described the area around the cavern as full of buried sutras -- Buddhist scriptures interred in the earth near Izanami's tomb in the belief that the texts would rise up when Maitreya, the future Buddha, arrives. Scholar D. Max Moerman has interpreted these sutra burials as a deliberate act of dual consecration: the buried texts made the site sacred to a Buddhist future while the mythological association with Izanami tied it to the Imperial House of Japan, whose lineage traces back to the gods she and Izanagi created. The rock at Hananoiwaya thus carries the weight of two religious traditions and the founding mythology of a nation -- all in a single cliff face above the Pacific.

Twice a year, on February 2 and October 2, the people of Kumano perform the otsunakake shinji -- the rope-changing ritual. Seven intertwined ropes are braided together into a single sacred cord 170 meters long. Dozens of citizens pull the massive rope along Shichiri Mihama Beach below the shrine, while seven officials climb to the top of the 45-meter rock face. The rope is stretched from the summit of the cliff to a concrete pole in the shrine enclosure -- a pole that replaced a sacred pine tree that once anchored the line. A sacred dance to the gods accompanies the work. If the rope holds and does not give way during the pulling, it remains in place until it naturally breaks -- a rope that withstands is considered a sign of good luck, and a new rope is placed alongside it rather than replacing it. The festival has been designated an Intangible Cultural Property of Mie Prefecture. In 2004, UNESCO inscribed the shrine as part of the Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range. The boulder still stands. The rope still holds. The entrance, for now, remains sealed.