Hakusan Heisenji

In the medieval period Heisenji was one of the largest religious complexes in Japan — six thousand monks, forty-eight halls, six thousand dwellings across the mountainside, controlling the Fukui side of the Hakusan pilgrimage. In 1574 it was burned to the ground in a single day during the Ikko-ikki uprising and never rebuilt at scale. What is there now is a small shrine, and underneath it the entire buried town.

What you actually see is moss. The whole forest floor under the cedars is a continuous green carpet, kept that way for centuries, and the approach is stone-paved through it — the local names for the place are the moss shrine and the moss temple. Excavation since the 1980s has uncovered stone-paved streets and house platforms across the slope, so the walk takes you through a city outline under a green blanket. It is twenty minutes from the dinosaur museum that everyone comes to Katsuyama for.