The hill behind the station
Step out of JR Yugawara Station and you meet a bronze samurai. He is Doi Sanehira, the lord of this coast in the twelfth century, and his statue went up in April 1981, for the 800th anniversary of Minamoto no Yoritomo's rising. Behind him rises the wooded hill everyone calls Shiroyama, "castle mountain." There is a stone on the summit marking the Doi castle, yet the town itself says nobody knows when the castle was built or how large it was. A whole mountain named for a castle that cannot be dated is a good place to start.
Walk the trail over Shiroyama and you pass through three different kinds of history, often within a few steps of each other. The first is written: an account of Yoritomo's flight through these hills after a lost battle in 1180, set down in the chronicle of the Kamakura shogunate. The second is physical: earthworks and stone Buddhas that are real, but centuries younger than that story. The third is legend: rocks and caves that local tradition ties to Yoritomo's escape. Telling the three apart takes nothing away from the walk. It makes each stop more interesting. For the route itself, with distances, timings, and toilets, use our Shiroyama hiking guide. This article is the story behind it.
Doi country
The Doi were a warrior family based in Doi-gō, a district that covered today's Yugawara and Manazuru. Jōganji, the Doi family's own Zen temple, describes Sanehira as the second son of Nakamura Munehira, of the Kanmu Heishi line, and as the man who served as manager (azukaridokoro) of the Hayakawa estate. The temple also names him the ancestor of the Kobayakawa, the clan that later rose to power in western Japan. The family house, the Doi yakata, is thought to have stood near today's Yugawara Station, at the foot of the ridge. In other words, the statue stands roughly where its subject lived.
Jōganji is a short walk from the station, and it is the best place to see the Doi in stone. The temple stands on the site of the family's private chapel, and its cemetery holds dozens of hōkyōintō and multi-tiered stupas from many periods, one of the finest groups of its kind in the Kanto region. Kanagawa Prefecture made it a historic site on 1 November 1955. In the late Kamakura period the temple held the rank of shozan, just below the great Gozan and Jissetsu temples, and it declined after the Doi were pushed out and the Odawara Hōjō took the area. Its juniper became a National Natural Monument in 1939, with a trunk about six metres round, and the town puts its age at an estimated 800 years. Local tradition says Yoritomo planted it before he left. The temple's Shichiki-dō hall holds statues of Yoritomo and the six men who fled with him, and that brings us to 1180.
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Jōganji and Gosho Shrine on film
A two-minute film from the Yugawara Town tourism section's channel, visiting Fudō Falls, Gosho Shrine, and Jōganji, the Doi family temple.
Produced by: Yugawara Town Tourism Division ↗
August 1180, as the chronicle tells it
On the 17th day of the eighth month of 1180 (Jishō 4, in the old lunar calendar), Yoritomo raised troops against the ruling Taira, with the help of Hōjō Tokimasa and Doi Sanehira. On his way toward Kamakura he was caught at Ishibashiyama, up the coast in what is now Odawara. Odawara City's archive puts the attack on the night of the 23rd, by Ōba Kagechika's force of more than 3,000 riders, and the city's battlefield page describes Yoritomo's side as outnumbered more than ten to one and beaten. The battlefield is in Odawara, not Yugawara. What happened next is the part that belongs to these hills.
The Azuma Kagami, the chronicle compiled by the Kamakura shogunate, follows Yoritomo into the Sugiyama hills of Doi, where Sanehira led him into hiding. The pursuit nearly ended there. In the best-known scene, Kajiwara Kagetoki, a warrior on the Taira side, found Yoritomo's hiding place and deliberately let him go; Kagetoki would later become one of Yoritomo's closest retainers. Yoritomo also took a small Kannon image from his topknot and left it in a cave, and the chronicle says it came back to him later. Notice how little the chronicle pins down. It names the Sugiyama hills, but it calls the hiding place only "a certain cave." Every specific spot on today's trail comes from later identification and tradition.
The escape ended at the sea. With only seven men in his party, Yoritomo boarded a small boat that Sanehira arranged and crossed from Manazuru to Awa, in what is now southern Chiba. Within weeks he had rebuilt his army, and he went on to found the Kamakura shogunate. The flight became a story people kept retelling: the Noh play Shichiki-ochi, "the seven riders' flight," is still performed, and Yugawara restages the departure every spring in its Doi Matsuri warrior parade.
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The Doi Matsuri warrior parade
The town's tourism channel describes the Doi Matsuri parade, held on the first Sunday of April, as a recreation of Yoritomo setting out for the battle of Ishibashiyama.
Produced by: Yugawara Town Tourism Division ↗
One cave or several
On Shiroyama's western flank, Shitodo no Iwaya is the cave Yugawara identifies as the "cave in the mountains" of the Azuma Kagami and the Shitodo no Iwaya of the Genpei Seisuiki, a later war tale. Kanagawa Prefecture designated it a historic site in 1955 under the name Den Doi Sugiyama Gankutsu, and the first character, den, means "traditionally said to be." That small word is honest. The designation says this is the cave by tradition, which is as far as anyone can go. Our Shitodo Cave guide covers how to reach it.
What you see at the cave today is younger than Yoritomo. More than twenty stone Buddhas stand in and around the hollow, and the town explains that local people offered them over a long period in the Edo era, in memory of family members who had died. The cave was a training place for mountain worship long before that, and the town made the group of figures a cultural property in 1979. The hollow itself formed where softer volcanic debris wore away, and the Hakone Geopark, which covers Hakone and the neighbouring towns including Yugawara, notes that people may have helped shape it too. Please treat the figures gently. They were left for the dead, and they are not handholds.
Yugawara is not the only claimant. Next door, Manazuru Town presents its own Shitodo cave as the place Yoritomo hid after fleeing into the mountains. The Hakone Geopark offers a sensible reading: Yoritomo probably hid in several caves before he crossed to the Bōsō Peninsula. Odawara's account has him escaping into the Hakone mountains before sailing from Manazuru. Taken together, the two towns' caves read less like rivals than like two stops on the same desperate week.
The castle you can see
The castle that gave Shiroyama its name is on the summit ridge, and it is easy to walk past without noticing. Yugawara designated the Doi Castle Site in 2004 and lists its period as Muromachi to Sengoku, roughly the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The town describes six baileys strung along the ridge, using about 36 metres of drop from the main bailey to the sixth. The sixth bailey ends about 240 metres from the top, and a moat cut thought to be an outer defence lies about 150 metres beyond that, about 390 metres in all. Look for flat terraces stepping down the ridge and sudden trenches across the path. Those are the castle.
So the earthworks you walk through are later than Sanehira. The Yugawara Onsen Tourism Association's trail page calls the castle late Heian, Sanehira's own era, but the town, which designated the site, dates what survives to the Muromachi and Sengoku periods. Whether the Doi had a fort up here in 1180 is unknown. The summit itself is an open space with the Doi castle stone and an arbour, ringed by hydrangeas. On a clear day it looks over Sagami Bay, the Izu Peninsula, Hatsushima, and Ōshima. The path from the summit down to the castle site is rough underfoot, so take it slowly.
Stones with stories
Two boulders on the trail carry the best-loved stories. Tateishi, the "standing stone," is said to be a rock Yoritomo threw to test his fortune: it landed upright, and so, the story goes, did his luck. Kabutoishi, the "helmet stone," is where he is said to have taken off his helmet to rest while fleeing after Ishibashiyama. These are legends, and they are good ones, the kind a town tells about the week its local lord saved a future shogun. Yugawara is open about this. Its "Kamakura bakufu kaiun kaidō" walking route follows one theory of the path Yoritomo took, and says so.
Walking it
The full Shiroyama course is a long day. Kanagawa Prefecture's March 2026 trail map gives 13.2 kilometres, 582.2 metres of height difference, and 3 hours 58 minutes of walking, and the tourism association calls it a course for strong walkers. Our Shiroyama hiking guide has the route, and the Shiroyama hike and bath day pairs it with a soak afterwards. The town asks walkers to take their rubbish home, never collect plants or animals, wear proper shoes, and plan to be down before dark. Monkeys, wild boar, and snakes live on the hill, and the town says more walkers have been getting lost, so carry a map.
You can enjoy the view from Shiroyama without any of this. Knowing which layer you are standing in makes it better. The ridge is a sixteenth-century castle, the hollow below is an Edo-period shrine to the dead, the boulders are a town's favourite story, and somewhere in these hills, in a cave nobody can name with certainty, a beaten commander hid in the eighth month of 1180 and lived. Come down through Jōganji to see the Doi in stone, and end the day in the water that made the town famous, which is its own long story: how Yugawara became an onsen town. In late autumn the hill turns colour; our autumn leaves guide has the timing.