Matagi Country Is on the Other Side of Aomori

The matagi are real. The map that puts their trails around the Tomb of Christ is not. Shingo Village sits at the south end of Aomori, east of Lake Towada, in Sannohe District, on National Route 454 between the lake and Hachinohe. The mountain hunters live on the other side of the prefecture, under the Shirakami beech.

What the prefecture says the forest is

Aomori Prefecture describes the Shirakami Mountains as a range of about 130,000 hectares running from southwestern Aomori into northwestern Akita. Of that, 16,971 hectares of primary beech were inscribed as a World Heritage site in December 1993. The Aomori share of the inscribed land is 12,627 hectares. Those figures are on the prefecture's Shirakami page, updated February 26, 2025.

A heritage essay on the same forest says the beech is treated as a landscape on the order of 8,000 years old, and that Shirakami was inscribed in 1993 with Yakushima as Japan's first natural World Heritage sites. The essay's subject is not Shingo. It is the people who hunt that western forest.

Meya matagi

The essay calls them 目屋マタギ, the Meya matagi of Nishimeya Village, Nakatsugaru District. It quotes Kudo Shigeki of the Shirakami Matagi Sha. On that page he says matagi are people who hunt under strict rules, and that those who take Shirakami as their hunting ground are called Meya matagi. He says he walked the forest from childhood, following adults, learning the hunt and how to keep food. The page also says the group was formed because fewer people were living in the old way, and that he works as a guide.

The group's own listing on that essay: Shirakami Matagi Sha, 青森県中津軽郡西目屋村田代字神田104-36, telephone 0172-85-2628, established in 2000 by Meya matagi to keep the life and to guide people through it. The 古津軽 Nishimeya story describes the year as the hunters describe it there: spring mountain vegetables, summer ferns and fish, autumn mushrooms, winter hare and copper pheasant taken only as needed, and bear after the snowmelt, spoken of as something received from the mountain rather than something merely shot.

That same 古津軽 page reports a saying it attributes to a previous matagi leader, not as a dictionary etymology: an animal that has done no harm still has to be killed, the shot has to be clean, and each hunt means becoming a demon again — また鬼 — and so the word matagi. Treat that as a saying printed on that page. Do not treat it as settled linguistics, and do not treat it as a story about Herai.

Across the prefectural border, the same heritage essay points to the Ani matagi of the Moriyoshi area in northern Akita, and to Kumagai Tatsuya's novel Kaikō no Mori, which took the Ani hunters as its model and won the Yamamoto Shūgorō Prize and the Naoki Prize in 2004. That is Akita. It is still not Sannohe.

The distance is the fact

Nothing in these sources draws a hunting mandala around the Tomb of Christ, names a long-bearded stranger on the Shingo road, or hands the Jesus legend to a family of hunters. The tomb is a published sightseeing site in Herai, Shingo. The matagi are a mountain culture in Nishimeya and, farther on, in Ani. One prefecture holds both. The hold is geographic, not genealogical. A visitor can go to either place. Conflating them invents a tradition neither village has claimed.

Sources

• 白神山地とは — Aomori Prefecture: extent, 16,971 hectares inscribed in December 1993, 12,627 hectares on the Aomori side.
• 白神山地の森と生きる マタギの伝統をたずねる — Meya matagi, Kudo Shigeki's published remarks, Shirakami Matagi Sha, Ani matagi, and the 2004 novel.
• マタギの暮らしと仕事、白神山地を感じる — seasonal round, and the 又鬼 saying as reported there.
• 新郷村の概要 — Shingo at the south end of Aomori, east of Lake Towada, on Route 454.