Kegonji

**Three stamps, not one.** As the closing temple of the pilgrimage, Kegonji issues three — past, present and future. Pilgrims arriving with a completed book get all three here. **Touch the bronze carp.** It marks the end of the pilgrim's abstinence, and it is worn smooth by a thousand years of hands. **Do the dark passage.** The kaidan-meguri under the main hall is walked in complete darkness with one hand on the wall. It is short, and it is genuinely disorienting. **November for the approach.** The maple avenue along the shop-lined road up to the gate is the reason many Gifu people come, pilgrimage or not. **It is the only Saikoku temple outside Kansai.** The whole route is in Kyoto, Osaka, Nara, Hyogo, Wakayama and Shiga except this one. That deliberate outlier position is what the temple is about.