Shukubo

Temple inns on Mount Koyasan hit with penalties for tax violations.

Religious corporations operating Shukubo temple lodgings on Mount Koyasan in Wakayama Prefecture have been penalized for failing to declare more than one hundred million yen, six hundred and fifty thousand dollars in income, sources said.

The Osaka Regional Taxation Bureau audited more than ten such entities in fiscal 2025 and discovered that over half failed to withhold income tax at source and underreported corporate tax amounts, the sources said.

In some cases, private expenditures by chief priests and their family members were booked as business expenses, resulting in understated income from operating an accommodation service.

The practice leads to a failure to withhold income tax at source and underreporting of corporate tax.

Mount Koyasan is home to a monastic center for Shingon esoteric practice founded in eight hundred sixteen by the priest Kukai, posthumously known as Kobo Daishi.

It hosts one hundred seventeen temples, fifty-one of which operate Shukubo, according to the town of Koya, where the mountain is located.

The area was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List in two thousand four under the name Sacred Sites and Pilgrimage Routes in the Kii Mountain Range.

For example, making accommodations.

Most of the temples used to have Shukubo or temple lodging houses.

These were started at the beginning of the Edo era.

The heyday was in the 1970s and 80s when, according to David Morton, there were 72 or 74 temple Shukubo at the pilgrimage temples.

And now I think there are eight.

I talked to priests about the possibility of reopening their Shukubo because pilgrims love to stay in Shukubo.

Only two of the priests expressed the desire to reopen their Shukubo in the near future.

Others seemed to feel that it was something beyond what they could do with the resources they had.