Sakai is a port city of well over seven hundred thousand people, and yet in the middle of its houses and factory roofs sit green islands with water around them. Zenemonyama is one of those islands: a burial mound from the age of the great keyhole-shaped tombs, built in the fifth century or thereabouts for someone powerful enough to move an entire hillside of earth by hand. You will not see much of the keyhole from the ground. The shape only makes sense from the air, which is rather the point, because it was made for an audience of gods and passing clouds.
Start here and you begin a ride in a very particular frame of mind. The suburban streets of Sakai are flat, grid-like and patient, with traffic lights every few hundred metres and scooters nosing between the cars, so this is not where anybody opens the throttle. Take it as the overture. Within an hour or so the Osaka plain gives way to the foothills of the Kongo and Katsuragi ranges, and the road starts to tilt and twist the way you came for.
The rides that leave from this mound point at the old pilgrim country to the south: the Omine Okugakemichi, the mountain path that ascetics of the Shugendo tradition walk from Yoshino down to Kumano, and the Kumano Sanzan shrines with Fudarakusan-ji by the sea. It is a nice piece of continuity. The people who built this tomb and the monks who tramped through the Kii mountains were separated by a thousand years, but both were obsessed with the idea that the land itself is sacred and that you honour it by going to a lot of trouble. On the Omine route the summit area of Sanjogatake still keeps the old rule that women do not climb it, which tells you how long some customs last in these hills.
Practical matters are easy here. Sakai is a big city, so fuel stations, vending machines and convenience stores with decent coffee and rice balls are never more than a few minutes away. Fill the tank before you head into the mountains, because the stations get sparse and close early once you are deep in the Kii peninsula. Expect heat and humidity in July and August, and the best riding weather in October and November, when the air is dry and the hillsides turn red and gold. Remember that Japan keeps to the left, and that the local drivers are far more courteous than their reputation, as long as you stay predictable.