May 20, 2025

Day 41: Hojo-Imabari

Howdy from Towel Town, Japan! Yeah, I know I need to stop calling it that… but no! I can’t! Sorry!

Today was a long one: 33.4 km total, the last 3.5 km or so unplanned and not part of the actual pilgrimage route. Things went as planned today and they went well; first, 5.7 km to Asanami station, which was a lovely walk with some elevation gain up into the hills and back down again, with a side trip to see Ehime lilies and also a Kukai-related site I wasn’t aware of. There was a fine view from the top looking across the Seto Inland Sea - yup, good call on that one. I made my train with plenty of time to spare & began the next section, 21.9 km up to Imabari and then back down to the east, then back up on the far eastern side of Imabari, stopping by five temples in total. In short: a long, successful, pleasurable day with warm, slightly humid, sunny weather that definitely felt like Japanese summer was about to hit.

Earlier today, it occurred to me that The Nails’s follow-up song 176 Lines About 88 Temples wasn’t the smash it should’ve been, but then I realized that’s terrible even as far as dad jokes go. Let’s see, then if I can sum up today’s five as succinctly as possible:

Enmei-ji, T54: The hat-stealing contest was more interesting; overall, you seem to have a theft problem in the area, especially regarding osamefuda

Nanko-bo, T55: Prime real estate, downtown in a dying city; friendly monk that spoke perfect English

Taisan-ji, T56: Would it kill you to just put your buildings in a logical order? Whatever, no one’s gonna visit here anyways

Eifuku-ji, T57: Congrats on the sexy rebrand but damn, you need some better merch

Senyu-ji, T58: Wait, I have to climb a mountain? Never mind, the views are AMAZING. Love the Bond villain sky lair refectory, BTW!

In between all of that, let’s see, there was an absolutely enormous $6 katsu-don lunch, a stop to drop my pack off at the JR Clement, lots and lots of water consumed (it was hot!), even more water given as osettai by a friendly local, plus the usual assortment of half-empty villages, half-dead business districts, and everything else I’m used to about Shikoku that isn’t Matsuyama. Oh, and dinner with a JET program teacher.

It’s later and I’m tired, so forgive me if this is even more scattershot than usual. Looking back at some of the emails I’ve sent, I’m slightly mortified at how many egregious typos there are - but you know, I’ll fix that stuff eventually. What you’re reading is what I’m typing; I’m not going back to revise or fix things because when I’m done I’m usually just about to fall asleep. So: sorry/not sorry.

All in all, today was good because of how it began and how it ended. I’m glad I skipped the 15 kilometer road walk between Asami and Ōnishi stations; I could see it from the train and yuck, no thank you - just an endless slog next to heavy traffic on the edge of the road. The walk up to T54 was not particularly interesting until the outskirts of Imabari, where (after passing a turnoff to Kontex Towel Garden, a factory store for one of the many towel producers in Imabari, which is known for its high quality towels - very much a thing in Japan) I heard some very loud music playing along with occasional cheers. Of course, I had to have a look - there was an elementary school across the street with all of the pupils outside with a heck of a contest going on between grades/classes: the kids were hoisting one kid each per side up in the air - I’m guessing kind of the way rugby players do - and then two kids tried to steal the hat off of each other. Super fun!

From there, the temple was close by, but I was distracted by confusing signage and lost a couple of minutes going the wrong way around a pond, whoops. That temple had a pleasant shop attached; what I mostly remember, though, is having a conversation with an older Japanese pilgrim and two younger people about all of the foreigners walking the trail. Again, I couldn’t understand most of the words, but the meaning was pretty clear, somehow.

The walk from there basically made a beeline for downtown Imabari, which was looking pretty dire. After the Nishiseto Expressway opened in 1999, you no longer had to take a ferry to Shikoku from Hiroshima and the main island of Japan - you could just drive there instead. That pretty much killed Imbari’s CBD; it too has a long, covered shopping street but I didn’t see many shops open there.

I was starting to get somewhat hungry, hoping there was an obviously good place to eat, but all I saw were poky eateries selling stuff I wasn’t hungry for. The next temple was past the train line, between the sea and the train station, next to an enormous Shinto shrine, with a relatively new monument out front memorializing the people who died in US air raids towards the end of WWII. This temple had a lot of ‘dead air’ - there were large empty spaces between its buildings, giving in the feel of a SimTemple 2000 game that only just started a couple of minutes ago. Surprisingly, the young monk in the stamp office greeted me in English - a first! - and was not only an adept speaker of English, but friendly and happy to have a conversation about the weather. Why yes, it is hot! That made me smile.

It was only a couple of blocks back to the train station and hence my hotel; it was no problem at all leaving my pack with them, and oh man, I’m telling you: it makes all the difference not carrying that thing. I started heading south, away from the center of town, to get to the next three temples. One of today’s recurring motifs was “vending machines that are out of the one thing you wanted to drink”, so there was a lot of not drinking enough, stupid me. But hey, I managed. Just before the 3rd temple of the day, I saw a restaurant that specialized in pork cutlets, which is pretty much my favorite thing to eat here (katsudon, a pork cutlet over rice topped with egg and onions), so yay, go me. They even had an English menu available; I ate like a king for very little money & drank a lot of water while I was there. Just before getting to the next temple, and older Japanese guy flagged me down - I think he was just getting in his car after having recited sutras at the temple - and gave me a bottle of water, then asked to take a picture of the two of us together. That was a lovely gesture, but I had absolutely nowhere to put that bottle except in my front pants pocket, which looked kinda vulgar in a religious context, I’m just saying. Anyhow, that temple was deserted & confusing; the bell was waaaaay over to the right, the main hall somehow on the left, and surprise, the Daishi hall was opposite everything in an unexpected location. The most important feature for me, though, was (surprise) the goddamn toilet, which I guess is just how my body’s gonna behave now that it’s gallbladder-less Year 3. Hey, at least the first three years were cool, right?

The walk kept going after that; I downed the bottle of water as soon as I saw a vending machine (so I’d have somewhere to get rid of the bottle); the turnoff to T57 was marked by a very new billboard/signboard that very much looked like it should be advertising a crêperie or something, perhaps a coffee stand with lingerie models as baristas? Hard to tell. For the first time, the trail started to turn away from the main roads, heading along a nicely shaded path along the edge of the forest. Suddenly, a European (?) woman popped up walking the other direction in plastic sandals, no socks, looking very much like a waitress from Oktoberfest, with no hat or visible pilgrim bag. No idea what that was about… Anyhow, the next temple had obviously recently tried to jazz itself up a bit with some sexy new signage, but the merch situation wasn’t amazing. They had a couple of amulets (if that’s the word in English - those small cloth things that look like dime bags, good luck charms?) and a wagesa that had their snazzy new logo, but only in blue - alas. It of course also had a vending machine out of the one thing I wanted (some weird Pepsi energy shot drink I was curious about), so I had my first Mountain Dew of the trip. Bad call: tasted gross, didn’t do much to help my thirst.

From there, I thought the trail was just gonna wrap around the hill and head back north towards the coast, but nope. Oh, hell no. It started going uphill… a long ways uphill. And when I finally saw the temple gates, well, they were closed due to construction - so pedestrians had to take a long detour around the mountain along the road instead, which was also very steep. Oh man, that thing was up there! But holy cow, what magnificent views. I love that the refectory (or whatever it's called) was modern, triangular, on stilts, and projected out off the mountain - serious Evil Lair vibes. For I think the second time only, the stamp office was inside the main temple hall, which is always very slightly awkward; it took some time as a young woman had a couple of scrolls to be stamped etc.; there was also a young couple in a very good mood who were alternating being very serious about the religious aspects of their visit with just having fun, blowing incense smoke at each other and generally having a great time. It was a great vibe up there!

And then it was down, down, down a very long, steep forest trail - yay, finally not a road walk! - with an awesome, very weird wildlife sighting: an earthworm! Like, an enormous one:

That was amazing; I haven’t seen an earthworm like that Gippsland, Victoria, I believe. Thinking that there’d be a vending machine along soon, I was happily daydreaming about all the water I was going to drink (the Pocari Sweat at the temple just wasn’t enough), but nope, there wasn’t one until just before the train station an hour later, where of course I got stuck behind someone doing everything you could possibly do at a Japanese convenience store: order iced coffee, buy snacks, and apparently pay bills with cash. That took time, but hey, I got my ginormous bottle of water and drank the whole damn thing on the way to the train station. As a bonus, there was a run of very cool signage, including a shop called Bar Ber Seven, but alas, my picture of that didn’t come out, so you get this one instead:

Very San José Japantown to me. Anyhow! I made it to the train station and then realized there wasn’t going to be a train for forty minutes, so I just sat down and relaxed next to a Japanese pilgrim on a bench. Then, I checked my phone, and whoa, a bus was going to come by in 2 minutes, a bus that runs once a day. Sweet! I mansplained that to the lady next to me, who smiled and said she was too tired to run for the bus, but “bye-bye!” with a smile, so I ran for the bus, made the bus, got to the station, checked in to my hotel, took a shower, and started my laundry. Then, I remembered that I’d potentially agreed to dinner with an American ex-pat who lives in Imabari, and yup, he had time, so we met downstairs in my hotel (free happy hour three hours a night!), agreed to walk to a restaurant serving traditional food, and then went off walking at a very fast pace (hey, gay men, you know). I’d already walked 30 km, but the conversation was good, I was hungry, and we kind of made a grand tour of the downtown area before finding the restaurant he was thinking of, which was closed, so we went back over to the other side of town to a chain conveyor-belt sushi place instead, and… damn, that was good. Never been to a place like that before, but I need to do that more often! Nothing like a touch-screen menu that you can flip to English and that delivers sushi to your table in less than a minute. After some Earl Grey cheesecake, we decided to call it a night - I need to get walking, he needs to get up and teach English to Japanese schoolkids tomorrow - and we went our separate ways. Interesting fella and I hope to continue that conversation in the future, somewhere, someday.

That’s it for now - a massive trade fair starts in Imabari tomorrow, everything’s booked out for miles around, I can’t change any bookings to work around the weather, so the next two days are gonna be relatively short walking days. Goodnight for now!