Koyasan Digital Museum

The Koyasan Digital Museum offers an immersive VR experience of Koyasan’s cultural heritage, featuring a VR Theater, Koyasan Café Shizuku, and a Museum Shop.

Planning your visit

Koyasan is the mountaintop monastic complex founded by Kūkai in 816 as the centre of Shingon esoteric Buddhism — over a hundred temples, many offering overnight lodging to visitors, and the vast Okunoin cemetery where some 200,000 graves line a cedar avenue leading to Kūkai's mausoleum, where he is held to remain in eternal meditation rather than dead.

The Digital Museum uses virtual reality and large-format film to present what is otherwise inaccessible: the interiors of buildings closed to visitors, ritual practices, and the sculpture of Unkei and Kaikei, the great Kamakura-period Buddhist sculptors whose work is held in temple treasuries and rarely displayed. The Chōgen film covers the monk who rebuilt Tōdai-ji and commissioned much of that sculpture.

The museum's function is preparation and supplement rather than substitute — Koyasan itself, particularly Okunoin walked at night by lantern, is the experience.

Koyasan is reached by train and cable car from Osaka, a journey of around two hours. Allow an hour for the museum. The main booking is a ticket for the VR film programme. Current availability is listed below.