Last year my father and brother did the Henro trail alone, and along the way they met Sone-san and his son. As Sone-san only has 2/3rds of a heart, his wife doesn’t let him do the hike on his own. In this weird way, we’re doing him a favor by doing this with him, while still acknowledging that he’s doing us the far greater favor in that he has planned and mapped our journey so we can all have fun. To my surprise, there are three days we’re taking a train or a bus part of the way. This is because some of the temples are 30 km apart (18 miles) and we only have 8 days to make it on 23 temples.
Later on I came to understand that the point wasn’t so much how we traveled, but that we traveled. Even walking 90% of the way made us abnormal to the modern Henro. My brother, Boone, was a little upset at all the tour buses, saying it felt anti-Henro. We talked about that for a few miles, but we came to no real conclusions. Henro was different for each person, and perhaps some Henro was better than no Henro.
From the bus stop in Naruto, we walked up a hill and down a town path. It was pretty much all along paved roads, not what I was expecting. The town was very quiet, and the only people we saw were workers. We were the only pilgrims. As we passed by a house called ‘The German House’, Dad and Sone-san explained that the German POWs were housed near here during WWI. 
After the war, they chose to stay because they were treated much better as Japanese POWs than as German citizens. The temple seemed like it was built as an afterthought, with the town swirling around it, but apparently a lot of Japanese villages built the temple first and then everything else around it. From some of the higher vantage points, you can see the almost spiraling pattern, where buildings follow rivers and natural landscapes. They were both organic and exceptionally OCD at the same time.
Before we went in to pray, I had to get the right clothes. While dressing up as an O-Henro is not required, it certainly makes people a lot nicer to you. They recognize you as someone hiking, and are far more forgiving of, among other things, that smell a hiker picks up after a day tromping in the weather. The one thing everyone wore was a hakui, which is a white 3/4ths jacket (sometimes a vest). Even the bus Henro had this one on, and it really became, to me, the symbol of a Henro. All the hikers wore hats, though a surprising minority wore the cone-like Henro-Kasa (or sugegasa). 
Dad said it was too hot to wear, but I found that since it’s perched on your head, it protected me from the sun far better than my ass-hat (tm Miss Alli) and allowed a nice breeze through my hair. Sadly, my hair was still at that annoying ‘between’ state, where it’s too long to wear down and too short tie back without flopping out of the pony tail, so I wore a bandana. This had the cheerful plus side of soaking the sweat off my forehead before it ran down my nose, so no glasses-blisters this time!
All the hikers also had a Kongo-Tsue, which is a walking staff with a bell on it. The staff is cheap, and since you’re supposed to leave it at Mount Koya once you walk all 88, that makes sense. The handle is covered in a blue cloth, and there are some lines from the Heart Sutra embroidered on it. You also have a bell on the Kongo-Tsue, which is supposed to jingle and keep you in the present, or at least reality, and stop you from day dreaming. Anyone who knows me knows that I sit and day dream all the time, so this had no effect on my creative imagination. It’s on 100% all the time. All the walkers also had a sort of murse called a fuda-basami, in which you carry your immediate supplies. For me this included toilet paper and my passport.
If you’re a Buddhist, you also wear a wagesa, which is a scarf about 2 feet long and 3 inches wide. I generally only saw it in shades of purple/blue, though one was almost blood red, and they were all embroidered in gold. The scarf is a sort of layman’s priestly robe, which indicates you’re a general person on a holy pilgrimage. There’s also the Buddhist rosary that you wrap around your hand to pray, though I saw a lot of people with that on 24/7. For reasons obvious, I didn’t wear these.
Boone explained that the white hakui signified death, and that the Henro pilgrim knows they may die on the trail. I noted there that no one mentioned until then the high number of O-Henro who died on the trail, or that there was potential death involved. The staff represented Kobo-Daishi himself, and how the pilgrim leans on the staff, and thus on Kobo-Daishi, who in turn always travels with you.
I also picked up a special book that you get stamped and signed at each temple. You only get each temple page calligraphied once, but every time you visit you get a new stamp. This way, you an tell how many times a fellow Henro has walked the trail. There are also slips of paper called Ofuda, on which you write your name, your address, the date and a prayer (or saying), to leave at each temple, as well as to anyone who gives you a gift (settai) on the trail. I made a habit of writing something different on each of mine, and since you leave two at each temple, and I visitied 23, I had to come up with 46 different sayings. I only put my address on them when I gave an Ofuda to someone as a thank you, or to exchange at the end of an enjoyable time together, and even then I put my email address.
At each temple, you follow a pattern. First you wash your hands and rinse your mouth to clean and purity them for what you’re gonig to do. Second, you ring a giant bell (if it’s there and not being repaired), to announce your presence to the spirits. Then you can go pray. There are two Hondos (or shrines), called the inner and outer Hondo. You go to the outer one first, put an Ofuda in the box, give a small offering (about $.01 to $.05 US), and then read the Heart Sutra, before repeating this at the inner Hondo.
The Heart Sutra is hard to translate, and surprisingly enough, most people I met don’t know what it means. They read it in Sanskrit and don’t bother to translate it into their native language. Some translations are hellishly anti other religions, while some are ‘The Big Who’ of religion, which I can get behind. I chose to read a Big Who version and was pretty content in not setting my personal faith against the one I was choosing not to diss while in Japan. It’s a complex thing, honoring your own religion while not flipping the bird at others, and yet still not being seen to do the wrong thing. At a certain point, you have to accept that people are going to see what they want to see, no matter what you do, and the real issue of doing the right or wrong thing is a personal matter between you and your higher being. Maybe it’s just justification to do what I want, but if the Dalai Llama can eat meat, then I can visit temples and not be wrong either.
After all the praying, you get your book stamped and signed for $3 and go on to the next temple. But don’t think we did all this all ein-zwei, ein-zwei, of course. That’s ‘one-two, one-two’ for those of you who aren’t Eddie Izzard fans. At each temple, even the ones that were only half a kilometer apart, we stopped to rest our feet, drink water, wander about the grounds, admire the natural and the built beauty of the temples and read the history and legend of each one. Sometimes people would stop us to make sure we knew what was going on, and other times they just wanted to know what the Americans were doing in Japan.
That first day we only walked about three miles and I reflected on how Shikoku feels like the Japan I imagined. I always had this idea that Tokyo was a glittering techno-pop, ultra modern Japan (I was wrong there, but there are corridors right out of Bladerunner, to the point that I expected Harrison Ford to rush out). In contrast, rural Japan is sort of stuck in the 1950s and 1960s, just as much of the McHomes of suburban southern California are perennially trapped in the 1980s, when their boom happened. The towns are small and almost fuedal (there’s that word again!), trying to be modern without really knowing how. It made me think about what each culture feels it’s okay to sacrifice, and what we hang onto with our dying breaths. Civility is something I found beautiful in Japan, but I also missed the can-do freedom of America.
Everything felt ‘off’ to my Gaijin eyes. While I was doing my best to try and have as much of a Japanese experience as possible, I felt too tall, too broad, and too clumsy. I didn’t want to try too hard, and lose myself in the trying, but I didn’t want to force my American style on people either. I spent the eight days walking a thin line, conscious of every action I took, and how it was different. The houses weren’t the same either, and they and the cars are thinner, more compact, than in the USA. While Europe has small and thin buildings too, the ones in Shikoku could only belong to Japan. You couldn’t even compare it to the Japanese style houses in the US. Make no mistake, this was Japan.
Just in case I’d had any lingering thoughts or doubts about my location, the hotel room with it’s tatami floors and thin futons hammered it home. We stayed at minshuku, which are a cross between a motel and a bed and breakfast, somehow managing to keep the good aspects of both. They’re fairly cheap, at $40 to $80 a night, per person, and they include dinner, breakfast, and sometimes a packed lunch. Since we were traveling in the off season, and I was sharing a room with the boys, we got a rather huge room every night, bigger than my old studio apartment. The downside was that all the bathrooms and toilets are shared, but as almost every hotel had a Western toilet, I was okay. You also get Ofuro, which I miss terribly. See, in Japan, you shower with a hand-held shower outside the tub (in a bathing ‘area’) and get clean. Once all the soap and dirt is off you, you get into a 40C tub for a soak. I was in love.
At dinner, my skill with chopsticks (hashi, I was corrected) and willingness to try new foods that were ideologically (if not certified – yes, some food was) Kosher impressed the Japanese. At first I was offended by the thought that I was a n00b who didn’t know fuck all about culture, but eventually I learned that a lot of the worst sort of Americans come to Japan, and eat only McDonalds and KFC type food. I couldn’t imagine coming to France and not trying classic French dishes, and the very idea of trying to make your trip ‘familiar’ is repulsive to me. I feel that the purpose of visiting a foreign land is to embrace, as much as you can, that you are the stranger in a strange land, and this is your chance to learn something new.
This is how you grow.