Every morning at 6:00, a meal leaves a kitchen on a mountain in Wakayama. It is carried in a wooden chest up a path through about 200,000 graves, under cedars older than most countries, to a small hall lit by 10,000 lanterns. The man it is for died in 835. On Koyasan, Kobo Daishi, the monk who founded the place, is not considered dead. He is in meditation. So breakfast at 6:00, and again at 10:30, every day, for something like 1,190 years. I kept misreading that as 1,190 days. It's years. The menu changes. There's a monk whose job, as far as I can tell, is to make sure a man in meditation never gets the same lunch twice. Rain, snow, typhoons, two world wars. The temple's own records say no day was missed. Photography stops at the last bridge. There is a sign, but people put their phones away before they reach it, on their own, and I'm not sure anyone could tell you why. Around 50 of the temples on the mountain let you sleep there. Vegetarian dinner, a futon, 6:00 a.m. prayers, somewhere around $100 to $180 a night. You wake up in the dark and the meal is already on its way up the hill. Nobody there is trying to prove he's alive. They just never stopped setting the table.