When I returned to Japan, it was already autumn.

Under a clear autumn sky we went camping in Chichibu, and on the way back we crossed the basin, passed Lake Chichibu, and climbed the mountain road. At a certain height the vegetation changes, and beyond the planted cedar belt the colors of the broadleaf trees begin to show. Roughly 1,100 meters above sea level. While the streets of Tokyo were still dragging along the remnants of summer, the mountains of Chichibu had turned fully to autumn.

Mitsumine Shrine sits halfway up Mount Mitsumine, in the deepest reaches of Chichibu.

According to shrine tradition, it was founded by Yamato Takeru. On his eastern campaign he climbed this mountain and enshrined the two deities who gave birth to the land, Izanagi and Izanami; that is said to be the beginning. Later, Emperor Keiko, gazing at the beauty of the three linked peaks of Kumotori, Shiraiwa, and Myoho-ga-take, is said to have bestowed the name "Mitsumine," meaning "three peaks."

Standing at the entrance is the Mitsu-torii, a rare form in which a large torii gate is flanked by two smaller ones, and on either side, in place of guardian lion-dogs, wolves keep watch with gleaming eyes. The familiars of Mitsumine are wolves. The Japanese wolf went extinct long ago, but here it lives on as "O-inu-sama," the honored dog, and since the days of Edo, a city known for its fires, talismans against fire and theft have been distributed to devotional confraternities across the whole Kanto region. You pass through the Zuishin Gate, walk between giant cedars, and come out at a worship hall covered in brilliantly colored carvings.

And yet what you feel standing in the precincts is "something" apart from all that history.

There is something in this place older than the Jomon period. Trace the shrine's history through records and legends and you get a little over a thousand years. Even if you believe the story of Yamato Takeru, it is less than two thousand. The Jomon people began living in this basin more than ten thousand years ago, but prayer probably took up residence on this mountain even earlier. In the valley seen from the Yohaiden, the hall for worshipping from afar, a sea of clouds hangs. In fact, fifteen million years ago this basin was a real sea. As for the limestone of Mount Buko, the symbol of Chichibu, it is the coral reef of a southern sea from more than two hundred million years ago, carried here on a tectonic plate. Long before the Jomon, before humanity itself, this mountain was "here."

One day, someone looked up at the three peaks and felt something there. The myths and the shrine buildings are nothing more than names that humans later gave to that sensation.

Meanwhile, Japan's shrines and temples today are overflowing with inbound tourists.

At the thousand torii gates of Fushimi Inari there are far more people than gates. At Senso-ji, Meiji Shrine, and Kiyomizu-dera there are days when Japanese visitors are the minority. Amid the weak yen and tourism policy, this country's "sacred places" have been thoroughly converted into tourism resources.

At Mitsumine Shrine, however, there was hardly an inbound tourist in sight. But it has been christened "the wolf shrine," and its discovery is only a matter of time.

Mount Koya, too, was once protected by being "far away," but today most of the guests at its temple lodgings are foreigners. Once it is introduced on English-language social media as "the mountain shrine that worships wolves," Mitsumine will follow the same path within a few years. There is no bait the algorithm loves more than "a sacred place nobody knows yet."

And the "three" of Mitsumine refers to the three peaks, but humanity has always seen a special meaning in the number three itself.

The Kojiki writes that when heaven and earth first opened, three deities appeared first: Ame-no-Minakanushi, Takamimusubi, and Kamimusubi. These gods, called the Three Deities of Creation, hide themselves away without ever showing their form. Japanese mythology begins with "three."

And Japan is not the only place where the world begins with three.

In Genesis in the Old Testament, on the third day God gathered the waters, separated sea from land, and made plants grow on the earth. After the great flood, all the peoples of the world are said to have branched out from Noah's three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Those who appeared before Abraham to announce the birth of an heir were also three travelers. Later, Christianity would define this God as the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The wise men who came from the East to worship the newborn Jesus are, by convention, three as well. Yet the Bible gives no number. From the three gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, later generations counted three men.

In India, Brahma creates, Vishnu preserves, and Shiva destroys: the Trimurti. In Norse mythology, Odin and his two brothers carve up the body of the giant Ymir to make the world, and fate is spun by the three goddesses, the Norns, as past, present, and future. In Greece, too, it is the three goddesses, the Moirai, who spin, measure, and cut the thread of a human life. And Laozi says it plainly: the Way gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, and three gives birth to the ten thousand things.

Why, then, three?

The Pythagoreans regarded three as the first number to possess "a beginning, a middle, and an end," and so as the number that represents the whole. In geometry, two points make only a line; only with three points does a surface close. Only with three legs does a thing stand on its own. Yin and yang, heaven and earth, life and death. Two stops at opposition, but with three, for the first time, a "world" comes into being.

The wolves along the approach have protected people from fire and theft since the days of Edo, but they cannot protect a place from "discovery."

It is a matter of time, and in a few years, on this very approach, words about "three" from all over the world will no doubt be flying back and forth.