PRICING POLICY

§1. Why We Speak About Price

Two foundations central to how we live are quietly thinning.

The first is the foundation of faith carried at Dewa Sanzan. The mountain practices, the lodges, and the relationships of coming and going between sendatsu and believers that have held this place for centuries are receding.

The second is the foundation of social life in Japan itself. The systems of social support and shared public life that allow people to live, raise families, and grow old with some measure of security, are under strain.

Megurun stands in a rural region, but our commitment is not bounded by region. From where we are, we want to take part in holding up both of these foundations: the faith carried at Dewa Sanzan, and the social fabric that holds the country together.

The price you see is set with both of those commitments in mind.

A practice of faith is not, by its nature, something to be bought or sold. We offer a price knowing this. We do not pretend the contradiction away.

Why, then, do we set a price at all? Because welcoming those who wish to take part, honoring the people and places of practice, paying full statutory social insurance for those we employ on permanent contracts, paying wages that can carry their share of the public weight, and meeting the taxes that sustain it, all of this requires an economic foundation. The price is a means toward that end. It is not the end itself.

We have chosen not to stand on the side that maximizes return, but on the side that supports. This choice runs through everything that follows.

Because we are asking this of you, we open our numbers. In the chapters that follow, we set out plainly what this price is for, where it goes, and the economic ground on which our work stands.

We do this knowing that not everyone will share these commitments, and that there are many other ways to encounter Dewa Sanzan. We welcome those alternatives. What we offer here is for those who, having seen the numbers, choose to stand with us on the side that supports.

Takeharu's voice (placeholder, to be replaced by his own words): I still hesitate, every time, to put a number beside something that was given to me freely. I hesitate too to say plainly what we are committing to: full statutory social insurance for those we employ, wages that can carry their share of social support and taxation, a stance of holding up not just this region but the wider Japanese society that has cared for us. These commitments are not modest. They ask much of a company of our scale. I want to name them anyway. They are what we have chosen, and I would rather be honest about that choice than soften it.

What you take part in is not a product. It is a practice of faith that is still alive at Dewa Sanzan, carried on today by people who have inherited it. When you pay, you are not buying an experience from a shelf. You are stepping, for a time, into something that has been going on long before you arrived and will continue long after you leave.

When people hear the name Dewa Sanzan, their eyes turn first to the shrine. The shrine stands at the center of this faith, and rightly so. But it may help to begin with a wider picture. Dewa Sanzan is a sacred place of mountain faith, where the yamabushi and the path of Shugendō, the Shinto of its shrine, and the Buddhism of its temples have been gathered into one living practice. Seen this way, what has kept this place alive over the centuries are the pilgrim lodges, the yamabushi and the sendatsu who guide, and the believers who come. At a glance it may seem that the yamabushi, or Shugendō itself, are what make Dewa Sanzan what it is. In truth, what makes it so is something quieter: the coming and going between the lodges and the believers, a way of practicing faith that has continued from before the early modern era and continues still. Dewa Sanzan is a sacred place because that relationship of coming and going is not a memory but a living, present thing.

This is what your participation reaches, in the first place. It reaches the knowledge and the hours of the sendatsu who walk with you. It reaches the lodges that hold the practice in place. And it reaches the carrying of that relationship to those who will come after.

There is a second place your participation reaches. It reaches the deeper social ground on which this place, and the country it belongs to, stand. Japan as a whole is moving through a structural change. The number of people who can work is falling, while the number of people who need support is rising. The systems of social support, the foundation that allows people to live, raise families, and grow old with some measure of security, are under increasing strain. The same pressure works at the level of the region. Here too, fewer people are working, and the work itself, along with those who carry it, is thinning. The function of the community begins to weaken.

Faced with this, simply working is not the same as supporting. As the working population shrinks and the cost of social support grows, a person who is only working ends up, in net terms, on the side that receives, not the side that supports. To stand on the supporting side, the wages earned and the taxes paid have to be enough that what is put back in exceeds what is drawn out. Organizations, in our view, are no different. They have to be built so that those they employ can themselves stand on the supporting side. This is where we have placed ourselves.

Your price helps us keep our footing on that side. Through that footing, your participation joins us in supporting the social ground of both this country and this region.

These are the bearers of what we ask you to support, in two senses: the bearers of the faith, and the social ground on which that faith is still being practiced. Together, they are what your price is for.

This is also why we take care to welcome those who enter the circle of this practice through the lodges. We hold a quiet concern. Were Dewa Sanzan to become the shrine alone, without the lodges and the believers who come and go among them, the faith of this place would become something other than what it has been. We are here because of that concern.

Both of these foundations are, slowly, growing thinner. The practice of faith has been quietly receding amid the wider changes of our time. The social ground, as we have just said, is under strain too, in ways that touch this region directly. We will speak plainly, in the next two chapters, about each.

For now we ask only this: if this commitment of ours, to both of these foundations, speaks to you, stand with us. What we offer here is, in the first place, for those who share that understanding.

In §2 we named the first place your participation reaches: the bearers of this faith. Here we open, in plain figures, how that payment actually moved through our books.

In 2025, about 15% of our total company expenditure went directly to the faith sector at Dewa Sanzan: the shrine, the pilgrim lodges, and the temples that hold this practice. Within that 15%, the lodges received 63.9%, the Dewa Sanzan Shrine 29.3%, and other temples and shrines 6.8%.

This is the share that leaves our company and reaches third parties carrying the practice. It is the measure we hold ourselves to.

The way this money moves matters, not only the amount. In the faith of this place, the flow has long taken a particular shape. People came to the shrine, came to the lodges, and from being received and supported in their practice they offered something back: prayers, offerings, contributions. Those offerings, in turn, sustained the people and the places that received them. The flow was not transactional in the way a market is. It was nearer to a gift returned to a gift. What we send to the bearers of the faith, through our company's payments, is meant to belong to that older flow rather than to override it.

We say this with care. We are not claiming that money for faith is somehow better than money for tourism, or that one kind of visitor should be preferred over another. Visitors are welcomed at Dewa Sanzan in many forms, and we are glad of it. What concerns us is something else. Dewa Sanzan, its mountains, its lodges, the cluster of pilgrim houses in Toge, has been shaped over a very long time toward the practice of faith. The form of the place, the work of those who live in it, and the kinds of income that flow through it have all been arranged around that practice. As the wider attention turns more and more toward tourism, the older streams of income, born from faith, prayer, ceremony and contribution, are quietly losing ground to streams born from lodging and meals. Both are real, both bring something to the region. But if the faith-born streams fade, the form that has held this place will lose what it was shaped for.

In this context, one sign stands out. Of the close to thirty pilgrim lodges that stood in Toge a decade ago, six have closed their doors since. Around twenty-four remain today. The reasons are many and intertwined, the wider turning away from religious life across Japan among them. We do not claim to halt this. What we are saying is that, with this background in view, we have chosen to direct our payments toward the faith sector, in the older form of the flow, and to keep doing so over years rather than seasons.

Supporting a practice of faith is not a one-time act. The lodges, the sendatsu, the relationships between them and the believers, do not need to be paid once. They need to be paid into, year after year. The price of a single program is small seen in that light. What makes a difference is that the price holds across years, and that companies like ours keep placing their share inside that older flow. That is what your participation, on this side, is for.

In §2 we set out the second place your participation reaches: the wider social ground on which this country and this region stand. This chapter shows how the position we have taken there takes shape in our day-to-day work.

Before we move to figures and structure, we want to say something carefully. This commitment is not made in judgement of those whose lives place them on the receiving side of social support. People live the lives they are given to live, and what looks from one angle like dependence is, from another, simply the ordinary unevenness of human life. We are not writing about them. We are writing about ourselves, and about the choice we have made as an organization that can choose. Faced with a system of social support whose continuation is, in plain terms, becoming difficult to assure, we decided to take an active part on the side that holds it up. That is what is at issue in this chapter.

That choice has taken several concrete shapes in our company.

The numbers behind this are worth holding in view. Japan's working-age population, those aged fifteen to sixty-four, peaked in the mid-1990s at around 87 million people. It has fallen to roughly 71 million today, and is projected to drop to about 62 million by 2040. Over the same period, the total cost of social security in Japan, the funds paid out for pensions, medical care, and long-term care, has roughly tripled, from around 47 trillion yen to over 130 trillion yen, and is projected to reach roughly 190 trillion yen by 2040. The share of that cost that has to be carried by each person in the working-age population now sits at around 2 million yen per year, and is projected to rise to around 3 million yen per year by 2040. The burden on each working person, in other words, is on a path to grow by something close to one and a half to one and three quarter times over the coming fifteen years.

What this means at the level of an individual worker is that simply being employed is not the same as being a net contributor to the system. By the rough arithmetic that runs through this question, a worker moves from the receiving side to the supporting side somewhere in the range of five to six million yen of annual income. Below that, what is paid in through income tax, residence tax, and social insurance contributions is likely, over a lifetime, to be less than what is drawn out. Above it, what is paid in starts to exceed what is drawn out. The figure is approximate, and individual circumstances move it. But it is well above the average annual wage in Japan today, which sits at around four and a half million yen.

We have built our employment around these realities.

We employ our regular staff on permanent contracts, with full statutory social insurance. The statutory employer contributions to pension, health, and long-term care insurance are paid in full alongside their wages. We see this as the baseline floor of what a company that wants to stand on the supporting side must do.

We aim to pay wages that allow those who carry them to be net contributors to the social system, not net recipients. A wage matched to the local average, in a region whose own working population is shrinking, would not be enough for this. We aim instead for a level of pay at which, through income tax, residence tax and social insurance contributions taken together, the worker puts more back into the system than they draw out of it. This is not a wage relative to the local market. It is a wage relative to the wider weight of social support across the country.

Beyond payroll, the company itself contributes through corporate taxation and other public dues. We also maintain our base in a former pilgrim lodge building in Toge. The cost of holding that building in working condition is part of our share in keeping the village viable as a place where people still live.

In figures, the share of our 2025 company expenditure that flows into this second commitment, into the social and regional ground beyond the faith sector itself, can be read this way. Of the roughly 34% of our total company expenditure that remained in the village of Toge in 2025, the share attributable to the faith sector (14.1%) was set out in §3. What is added beyond that is wages paid to permanent staff living in Toge year-round (18.4%) and the cost of maintaining our base in a former pilgrim lodge building (1.9%). Around twenty per cent of our total company expenditure thus flows, on this second side, into the social and regional ground we have chosen to support.

We do not claim these figures are large enough on their own to hold up systems on a national scale. What they mark is the position we have taken. The share, whether small or large, is being put down on the supporting side, year after year, rather than left on the other.

Supporting the social ground is, like supporting the faith, not a one-time act. It happens, or fails to happen, in the slow accumulation of payrolls and tax filings, of insurance contributions and building upkeep, year after year. Your participation, on this second side, is what allows that accumulation to keep going from our end.

The two preceding chapters showed where your participation reaches: toward the faith carried at Dewa Sanzan, and toward the social ground of this country and this region. Both of those movements pass through a single point, the company that runs this work. This chapter is about that company, as it stands at the end of the 2025 fiscal year.

We do not write this chapter once and leave it. The chapter belongs to a year. The picture it gives will look different next year, and the year after, because a company that carries commitments of this scale is not a static thing. What follows, then, is our position at this point in time.

In the year just closed, the company's total revenue was approximately 34.9 million yen, with a gross margin of around 65%. Of total company expenditure, as we have set out, about 15% went to the faith sector, and about 34% remained in the village of Toge in one form or another.

After all of this, after wages, social insurance contributions, taxes, the payments to the bearers of the faith, and the upkeep of the building we work from, the company finished the year at a loss. We will not give the precise figure here. What we will say is that the loss is a real one, and that the price we are asking is set with the aim of moving the company, year by year, from where it now stands toward a position from which it can carry these commitments without losing ground.

We hold this position knowingly. A company that wanted only to grow its own returns would have several other options available to it. It could pay lower wages, closer to the local average. It could employ on terms that avoid statutory social insurance. It could choose a base of operations less expensive than a former pilgrim lodge in the village it intends to support. It could direct less of its income to the bearers of the faith. We have not chosen any of these. We have chosen, instead, to keep the commitments in place and to absorb the loss in the meantime, asking the price itself to do the work of closing the gap over time.

The proof of this choice can be seen in two things. We have been able to keep a former pilgrim lodge building, a piece of the cultural fabric of this faith, alive and in working use, rather than letting it fall away. And in a village where the number of younger residents has been falling year by year, two young people have, over time, settled here and made their lives here, doing this work with us. We did not set out to engineer these outcomes. They came as the natural shape that not pursuing short-term return tends to take.

This is the company you support when you take part. It is not a finished business. It is a business in the process of arranging itself into a sustainable form around two commitments that, if we are honest, ask more than the current price entirely meets. We are open about that. Your participation, in the end, reaches a company still walking that path, and willing to keep walking it.

We come to the close of this writing. The price we set is not, in the end, about the price. It is about a position we have chosen to hold, and the way we hope to invite others into it.

Across these pages we have tried to do one thing carefully: open the numbers, and let the position behind them be visible. The faith carried at Dewa Sanzan needs to be paid into, year after year, by those who can. The social ground on which this country and this region stand needs to be carried, year after year, by those who can carry it. We have placed ourselves, as a company, in the work of both. This is not a posture of authority. The authority of this faith belongs, as it has for centuries, to those who carry it, not to those who come alongside. We are alongside.

We made one promise at the beginning, that the price would not be hidden behind language, that the numbers and the reasoning would be opened. We have tried to keep that promise. We have shown where the money goes, who carries this work, what choices have been made in our own company, and where we still fall short. We have not asked you to take the price on faith. We have given you the working out and asked you to read it.

We also said, at the beginning, that this is one path among others. People come to Dewa Sanzan in many ways. Some come to walk the mountains as travelers, some come through other organizations, some come with no organization at all. All of those ways are real, and we welcome them. What we offer here is not for everyone. It is for those who, having read what is in these pages, find themselves on the side that supports, and who would like to walk that path with us.

We hold something else, alongside this. The practice of Yamabushi, in our understanding, belongs to anyone who seeks it. That is what we said in the opening, and we mean it. Today, in this transitional period, we welcome first those who can stand with us on the conditions we have set out: the cost of holding both the faith and the social ground, and the willingness to share in carrying them. That is where we are. It is not where we wish to remain. Year by year, as the company gathers strength to carry these commitments without losing ground, we hope to open this practice more widely, so that it can become, more fully, what we have always said it is: something that belongs to those who seek it.

If that is you, in this stage or the next, you are welcome here.