On the Ferry

Nankai Ferry, Wakayama-Tokushima

Who was to know what should come home to me?

Who knows but I am enjoying this?

Who knows, for all the distance, but I am as good as looking at you now, for all     

    you cannot see me?

 Walt Whitman Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (1856, 1881)

 March 11, 2013

It was two years to the day after the Tohoku Earthquake and the secondary disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Japan was still reeling from the loss of life – nearly 20,000 people – and from the enormous blow to the country’s sense of prestige, security, and confidence. Uneasily navigating the straits of middle age, I was taking stock of my life and connection to Japan. I was on the ferry from the city of Wakayama on Honshū, the largest of Japan’s four main islands, and Shikoku, the smallest of the main islands.

I had last been in Japan eight years earlier when I took my 10-year old daughter in 2005. Soon after that visit, a painful divorce and joyous new relationship had absorbed my attention. I felt a visit to Japan was overdue. This time, I wanted to do something difficult (a penance of sorts?), so I took my bicycle to travel the nearly 750 miles of the Shikoku Pilgrimage (Shikoku Henro, 四国遍路 or Shikoku Junrei, 四国巡礼).

Also known as the Shikoku hachijū-hakkasho (the 88 Places of Shikoku) for the 88 temples that a pilgrim is supposed to visit (not to mention 20 subsidiary {bekkaku} temples and hundreds of smaller temples (bangai), the Shikoku Pilgrimage honors the monk Kūkai (空海774-835, also known as Kōbō Daishi 弘法大師), a son of Shikoku who brought the Shingon school of Buddhism from China to Japan. The pilgrimage dates to the 16th-17th century. I had first learned about the Shikoku Pilgrimage at a talk given by Ian Reader, a British scholar of Japanese religion and religious pilgrimage, some 20 years prior. A seed was planted.

In the spring of 2013, my mother was terminally ill. I had planned my trip to Japan for nearly a year, but with her illness and the uncertainty of its course, I thought it best to postpone. Mom insisted that I go and said she would be here when I returned. And she wanted me to tell her about the journey. The spring of 2013 felt like a turning point in my life.

My journal entry for the morning of March 11 speaks of the “cold, windswept deck” of the Wakayama-Tokushima ferry. It was there that that I met my first actual pilgrim, a round-faced boy wearing what appeared to be a boxy factory uniform. In fact, I soon learned, he would soon put on the traditional white robes of the walking pilgrim. (The white symbolizes purity and innocence, but also reminds the wearer of a shroud: on the arduous journey, the pilgrim must be prepared to die at any time.) Unlike most Japanese, he assumed I understood the language: Kaze ga tsuyoi desu ne! (“Strong wind!”). His Japanese was polite, respectful, perhaps a bit adultified.

He told me that he was 15 and taking advantage of the couple of weeks before he started high school in early April. His hair had been freshly buzz-cut, the very picture of a young monk. In fact his father was the priest of a temple near Mt. Kōya (Kōya-san) in Wakayama, the seat of Shingon Buddhism in Japan, founded by Kōbō Daishi himself in the early 9th century.

The young pilgrim smiled broadly, openly: A sweet boy. With his father’s blessing, he planned to walk one prefecture’s worth of the pilgrimage route, maybe two dozen of the 88 temples along the entire route. I guess that would have kept him walking for about 10 or 12 days, alone. Compared to American teenagers, I had always experienced Japanese teenagers as very young. This boy was different. He seemed to have emerged from another era: simple, pure, almost naïve, yet more mature than his contemporaries.

His name was Takahiro Tsumoto, and he let me take his picture.

 * * * * *

Why did I go on this pilgrimage? I’m not sure. I’ve never been much for walking long distances, so I rode my bicycle. But the four prefectures of Shikoku – Tokushima, Kōchi, Ehime, and Kagawa – are mountainous (especially Ehime), which made for the most challenging bicycle ride I had ever taken. At most of the temples, I read the Japanese version of the Heart Sutra (Hannya Shingyō, 般若心経), which says in part:

 Therefore, given emptiness, there is no form, no sensation, no perception, no formation, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no nose, no tongue, no body, no mind; no sight, no sound, no smell, no taste, no touch, no object of mind; no realm of sight… no realm of mind consciousness.  There is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance… neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment.

These words, although clearly profound, proved well beyond my limited powers of comprehension. I did, however, like the incantatory sound of the Japanese: 

Kan ji zai bo satsu. Gyo jin han nya hara mita ji….

By dint of repetition, I became more proficient at reciting the sutra without stumbling over its strange sounds. But I’m not a Buddhist and did not experience any particularly spiritual insights during the pilgrimage. I did, however, realize how much I missed the people I love: my wife Felicia, our children Daniel, Nina, and Emma. At one point, the late afternoon sound of children’s voices from an afterschool program brought me to tears of longing for my own children’s childhood, the warm impression of their small bodies on mine.

My plan had been to call at all 88 temples. My friend Ken Tamai accompanied me for a couple of days at the start of the pilgrimage, but he had other commitments and had to return to Kobe. For two weeks I pedaled alone. By the time I reached #64 (Maegami-ji/前神寺), having skipped at least one temple along the way because it would have meant a tough slog up a mountain road, then doubling back to rejoin the main route, I’d had enough. I had visited and, after a fashion, had worshipped at two-thirds of the temples on the route.

Resting and ruminating outside the last temple I visited, I noticed that my bicycle’s rear tire had worn to the point of an inner tube herniation which was about to explode. I’d had the foresight to bring a folding spare tire, which I mounted on the rim. From that last temple, I made a beeline back to the city of Tokushima and boarded the ferry back to Wakayama. I had ridden along the coast, over mountain passes, through depopulated, hollowed-out towns and, scariest of all, through long, dark, shockingly reverberant highway tunnels. Was it a true pilgrimage? Maybe not. But I have no regrets for having done it.

* * * * *

When I returned home, I shared stories and photos with my mother from the long bicycle ride around Shikoku. Back in the 1980s, she and my father had visited Japan twice when my first wife and I lived there. She enjoyed those visits and, if her health had allowed, I’m sure she would liked to have gone again.

Along with most of my family, I was at mom’s bedside when she died at home in Montague, Massachusetts on June 2, 2013: Nancy Kent, aged 79.  

Like all languages, Japanese has many euphemisms for “to die”; my favorite is takai suru (他界する), loosely meaning “to other world.”

Takahiro Tsumoto, Nankai Ferry, Wakayama to Tokushima, March 11, 2013