Day 46: Saijō-Shikokuchuo
Sometimes things just don’t work out; learning to accept that is something most of us (not all of us!) have come to terms with in our lives. Thankfully, I’m only talking about weather here, not a friendship or a career choice. When I got to Miyoshi four days ago, I should have been able to see Mount Ishizuchi from there - but it was raining, so it didn’t happen. It more or less stopped raining the next day, but it remained cloudy, with occasional drizzle, and I couldn’t see much higher than the foothills - and definitely not all the way to the summit. The day after that, I climbed halfway to the summit of Ishizuchi to visit Yokomine-ji, T60, & it was so foggy and drizzly that I could barely see the temple, much less the enormous mountain behind it. For the last two nights, I had a hotel room on a high floor with a view of the mountain, but to paraphrase one of my favorite movies, The Limey, “you could see the mountain if you could see it.” I never could see it.
I’ve been watching weather reports for days now & it’s been kind of a tease. Every so often, a glimmer of hope would appear in a slightly different forecast suggesting there would be some visibility, a break in the rain, maybe even a little bit of sunlight, but that never definitely changed - and as I woke up this morning, hoping that the predicted clear-ish skies would happen and that the drizzle would stop, it didn’t. It was still damp, cloudy, dreich if you will, and I spent my morning deciding whether or not I should catch the early bus to Mount Ishizuchi. I did not; there was no point. Nearly 5,000 yen to see the grey, cloudy, drizzly skies but still not the mountain? Yeah, no.
Instead, I took a short train ride back to Hōju-ji, T62, for no reason other than I liked their… ugh, I don’t know the correct word for them. I have a couple of them at home from Japan: they’re kind of like tea towels, but they’re meant to be art, not towels. Thin, fabric things you’d hang on the wall, I suppose. I hadn’t bought any until Yokomine-ji, T60, and I wasn’t planning to buy any more, but I regretted not having bought one & had time to go do so. Plus, it’s a cool temple. Anyhow, I bought two of them from the vending machine there… and then realized they’re cheaper if you buy them from the gentlemen in the temple office instead. Whoops. Oh well! He asked me to fill out the survey form, I said I’d already done it a few days ago, and that was that. Back to the hotel room after that to grab my pack and check out…
What next, though? It’s a long, tedious road walk to my next hotel.. but I should do some of it, I reckoned, so I thought okay, I’ll take the train to the bekkaku temple along the way & walk from there. However, when I got to that temple, the weather hadn’t improved any, so I decided to just get back on the train, go one station further than I needed to, and have a look at two museums Google Maps threw out as being potentially interesting. Plus, if I’m being honest, I had an encounter with a local - I’m guessing someone really, really into the whole giving gifts to strangers thing - that made me want to get away from there. (He was being super nice, it’s just that I’m uncomfortable with people giving me things and then demanding stuff in return. In exchange for some snacks, a name slip, and some handwritten haiku, he asked me to write in his notebook for him, which is physically painful at the moment and even under the best conditions is barely legible due to my horrific penmanship.) So back to the train station and off to Kawanoe, then.
Shikokuchuo is another one of those modern city-constructions that’s really a few places stitched together to deal with depopulation; there are two bigger towns, Mishima (aka Iyo-Mishima, Iyo being the old name for Ehime prefecture) and Kawanoe. My hotel’s right between the two parts of town; the pilgrim trail passes close to Mishima, but doesn’t go near Kawanoe. However, I’m guessing that Kawanoe was the bigger town as it’s where the museums are, as well as yet another classic set of covered shopping streets (seriously, someone needs to make a photo book of those things already!).
The first museum I visited was a local history and archaeology museum; it was a beautiful, Ando-esque building, with very little actual content, none of it signed in English, no entry fee, and absolutely no visitors. The museum staff were friendly, let me stash my pack behind their desk, and even tried to have a conversation using Google Translate, along the basic lines of ‘what the hell are you doing here, you’re the first tourist we’ve seen in ages’ I believe. From there, another ten minutes’ walk to something like a paper museum, but more like a paper manufacturing company with a sales room and displays, albeit interesting ones. For example, they had an informative display of the history of toilet paper in Japan, being something that basically arrived with American troops after World War II. That didn’t take long; then, I stepped outside, started walking towards my hotel and in the direction of the enormous paper mills and factories that dominate the northern part of town, and… whoa, this city smells exactly like Antioch, California, a town in the Delta which also has paper mills. If you’re from the Pacific Northwest, you might know that smell as The Aroma from Tacoma; it’s… a lot. Phew. And then it hit me: this pilgrimage is kind of a funny thing because it’s never been updated to take into account where people actually live in the 21st century. The route and the temples were fixed centuries ago, which in turns leads me to wonder why, for example, there were five temples in or near the town of Komatsu, which is not much of a town at all in 2025. Similarly, there are big, modern towns such as Yawahatama that have zero pilgrimage temples there. It’d be a radical reworking to rethink the 88 in terms of where people actually are these days, but it’d be fascinating… well, at least to me.
Anyhow: it was now the early afternoon and I was about to pass by yet another conveyor belt sushi place, but it turns out they’re absolutely mobbed with families on Sunday afternoons, so it took quite a while to get a table there. Even so: worth it, even if the ‘seared sushi’ at this place was raw, not seared. I ate well for ten bucks, what can I say? And then I headed for the Super Hotel I’d booked for the princely sum of $41, checked in, got my room code, and then was reminded it wouldn’t work for the next 30 minutes, so I happily sat myself down in the lounge and charged my devices.
15h00 rolled around, I rolled up stairs, and met a cyclist from Corvallis, Oregon who was nearing the end of his Japanese vacation, having started in Kyushu. I showered, re-read the maps, and got confirmation that all of my room re-bookings worked out OK, so I’m well and truly set for the rest of this trip now. Of course, I eventually got hungry again - we Bears do, you know - and had a look around for nearby restaurants. Well hello, Pizza Hut - sure, why not? They had a deal on a very Japanese pizza, four different toppings on 25% each of the pie, ranging from normal (margherita) to vaguely Wolfgang Puck (bulgogi) to traditional Japanese (potatoes and corn, teriyaki chicken and mayo). That was just about the greasiest pizza I’ve ever eaten - and yet my body seems to be having no issues digesting it. I give up. I don’t understand what’s going on here. Maybe it’s the weird Japanese red wine doing something magical (it’s made from Muscat Bailey A, a local grape), maybe it’s because I’m lying down and not standing up… argh, no idea.
And then, suddenly, it was bright outside my hotel room window for the first time in days:
So there’s hope yet; the skies appear to finally be clearing, the weather report suggests it’ll be sunny on Tuesday, and that’s the day I expect I’ll make it to Unpen-ji, the highest point of the pilgrimage and one of the biggest temple complexes. I sincerely hope that comes to pass.
Random notes: It’s been a few days since I flat-out hiked the pilgrimage trail proper; I regret that and yet I don’t. As much as I love the fantasy of having walked every kilometer of this thing, it doesn’t make sense. Why a pilgrimage? Does it benefit anyone for me to walk dozens of kilometers along roads in the countryside when I could be visiting museums and learning something about this place instead? Which is a better use of my time?
Tomorrow’s the final anxiety-inducing lodging option of the trip, being a tiny minshuku in the middle of nowhere with no online preference. The hotel in Ozu booked for me over the phone, but I’ll definitely get there before the last bus of the day leaves the mountains just in case something goes wrong. I do my best to always have a backup plan…
For some reason, tonight’s hotel has Netflix on their TVs. I tried watching a movie, but the TV also has motion smoothing enabled in a way I can’t turn off - yecch. So that’s not gonna happen. Guess I’ll re-read the maps for this week instead…