April 15, 2025

Day 6: T16-Komatsushima

One of the constraints I set myself when planning this trip was simple: no help, no tourist agents, no asking Facebook groups, and only online bookings. That’s more complicated than usual here in Japan, where many hotels still rely on phone (and even sometimes fax!) bookings to make a living.

As a corollary, I was also hoping to experience a wider range of accommodation than usual for Shikoku 88 pilgrimages. I would expect that many pilgrims would want kind of an Olde World experience, with mostly traditional inns wherever possible; me, well, that’s cool, but I also love seeing how people actually live in the 21st century; as fun as it is to do sort of a Ren Fayre thing here in Japan, it isn’t representative of how people live now.

This leads me to tonight’s accomodation, the Super Hotel Tokushima Komatsushima Natural Hot Spring, a few hours’ walk from Tokushima station and about an hour’s walk from T18, Ozan-ji. Staying here involved a detour of about 1 hour total, but it met my requirements as nothing near T18 was bookable online and it’s a business hotel, a kind of hotel that’s all over Japan. By that I mean it’s almost all single rooms, everything is tailored for business travelers, and it’s inexpensive but has a ridiculous number of amenities available. The room I’m staying in tonight cost US $53 including all taxes - try finding a room for that price in California and you’ll probably come up with not a lot of options. Here, that includes a wide range of things such as a buffet breakfast, all-you-can-drink alcohol for two hours in the evening, a natural onsen in the building, loaner pyjamas, a selection of fancy packets of bathing products, toothbrushes, combs, deodorant spray, a humidifier in the room… it’s a lot of stuff!

If you’ve never seen a typical Japanese hotel bathroom, tonight’s is a great example of the style:

It’s kind of a self-contained unit that is slightly elevated compared to the rest of the room; there are signs reminding you to close the door lest steam set off the fire alarms. Once the door is closed, you can spray water all over the place and none of it will escape as there’s a drain in front of the shower-tub combo as well. The toilet has a bidet function; there are a few bottles of soap, conditioner, and shampoo; drinking water glasses (the tap water is specially treated to be extra delicious, apparently), a couple of towels, a bathmat, and even a disposable toothbrush that you can turn in to reception for a special souvenir/thank you for not creating more waste. Compare this with the last time I stayed at a Motel 6: there was a single towel and a tiny bar of cheap white soap. Night and day, right?

Anyhow, let’s back up a bit. Last night’s supper was a heck of a spread; the high point was a steamed foil packet of salmon with white miso and citrus, but the homemade carrot soup also stood out. Breakfast was also very fine, with the usual Japanese breakfast spread of rice, pickles, tofu, tea, and a number of other delicious things.

It wasn’t far to the first and only temple of the day, T17, Ido-ji; I made it just in time before declaring a toilet emergency; I know it’s not polite to speak of such things, but almost every vacation in another country seems to involve a week or so of GI distress while my body adapts to the local microbiome. I made it to the church on time - uh, the WC - and did remember to take off my Buddhist temple garb beforehand so as not to offend anyone. After washing my hands, I put my vestments back on and headed back to the well at the entrance to properly purify myself before today’s reflection. Sadly, the winds had kicked up even more overnight, so lighting candles and incense was just not gonna happen.

Another three red stamps + calligraphy safely in my stampbook, I set off for Tokushima station. Amazon JP and Yamato said my new shoes were out for delivery, so I decided the best thing to do was to head straight for the center of town and not take the ‘official’ pilgrim trail, which meandered a tiny bit instead.

Once back in town, I went by the Tokushima Welcome Center to thank them again for last week’s orientation session - and to ask what I should do with a slightly used pair of Hoka size 13 hiking boots. Easy, they said; just run by this hostel a few blocks away and they should take care of that. Cool.

Although I’d received an email from Amazon saying that my shoes had been delivered, it also said to wait a few hours for a second one with a QR code I’d need to retrieve them from FamilyMart, a convenience store across from the main train station. I headed for the JR Clement hotel and enjoyed a meticulously presented (white gloves! bowing!) silver pot of Early Grey tea (with steamed milk!) for the princely sum of $5 and waited patiently for that 2nd email to arrive; it never did. Thankfully, I did eventually have the presence of mind to check my spam folder and there it was: the email had been sent just a few minutes after the first one and my new Salomon trail runners were waiting for me just a few dozen meters away.

Of course, it took some time to actually get there due to confusing crosswalks - some of them let to bus stops from which you couldn’t escape; there were also traffic police around giving you the stink-eye, so you couldn’t just cut across traffic if you felt like it. Nope! So there was a lot of standing patiently, waiting for lights to change, and then finally: new shoes! Well, that took a while as well as the cashier on duty had never checked out an Amazon delivery before, so his supervisor had to show him how to do that. No problem! Back across the street to the smoking lounge - so windy as to be unusable, thankfully - and then finally I had my new shoes on my feet. Are they wide enough? Not quite, but the fabric is synthetic, not leather, so stretchier. Once I’d removed the insoles and inserted my orthotics, they felt pretty good if perhaps slightly too long; these are US 14s and I’m more of a 13 - but you know? Much better than the Hokas; I put them in the giant Amazon paper bag, walked a few blocks to the HOSTEL PAQ, who graciously accepted them, and then got to walking.

My next destination? Bentenyama, a kinda sorta tourist trap (although legitimate tourist sites are signed in English here in Japan, this one was never mentioned on English-language road signs). It shouldn’t have been more than a couple of hours’ walk, and it was on the way to the next temple, but it took a while getting there because it started fucking hailing about 90 minutes away from central Tokushima, which meant I took over an apartment’s building bike parking shelter for a bit to unpack my bag, fish out all of my rain gear (including my giant hat shower cap thing), and get going again. That took time.

Earlier in the day, my husband Dan suggested I could just take the train to skip all of the city walking, but I ignored him because walking through cities is fascinating to me. No, it wasn’t as beautiful as a forest - and walking on pavement is way harder on my feet than dirt - but there were so many interesting things to see! Self-service bulk rice dispensaries. Restaurants of all kinds. Hospitals, old age homes, bus stops, love hotels, disreputable bars, and even a soapland whose sign had been inverted (and which had obviously been closed for a while). It amused me greatly to think that the ancient pilgrimage trail now went through the red-light district of Tokushima; I haven’t run into a pimp since, oh, probably Soho in the early 1990s, but hey, ran into one today subtly asking me inside a bar to meet a girl. (I smiled no; I wasn’t wearing my pilgrimage gear, but I imagine he saw my pilgrim’s hat on my backpack as I walked past and figured it out).

I could honestly spend more days walking through cities like this…

So many abandoned, vacant houses. So much decay; so many piles of crap spilling out of broken windows. And here and there some new businesses, some of which closed even though they should’ve been opened… so many questions!

Anyhow: Bentenyama is the shortest mountain in Japan. It stands a mighty 6 or so meters above the surrounding rice fields. 6 meters! Wow, much impressive.

The gift shop was closed for the season, so I couldn’t buy a certificate of having climbed it (or whatever). Thankfully, by this point, the hail had mostly stopped - and it wasn’t too much farther to my hotel. It would’ve been faster, but a construction site worker had been posted about 500 meters from the actual construction site to shoo me away from walking on that side of the street, even though my turnoff was about 200 meters away, well before the construction site - so I did my best to feign compliance and then run through lots of traffic to get back to where I wanted to go.

After checking in, enjoying the hot springs after a thorough scrub, and a pleasant chat with friends in England and British Columbia, I headed back outside - ugh, temps in the low 40s and still raining! - and dashed next door to Joyfull, which is kind of like a Japanese Denny’s. Much to my delight, they had a QR code ordering system with machine translation, so it wasn’t hard to get dinner on my table without a problem. This is what US $11 bought me: hot sake, rice, kimchi, pickles, pork soup, spinach, and a breaded pork cutlet with omelet and onion. Man, did that hit the spot! Afterwards, back to my room with a quick detour to the free booze spot in the hotel to take some Nikka whisky back upstairs with me.

So: here I am, in my loaner PJs, Japanese whisky in a tumbler by my side, sitting at a desk with a built-in bench, watching the last of the day’s sun set over the harbor just to the east of my hotel room. Today was the first time I wasn’t pounding ibuprofen due to back pain after the day’s walk; I think the new shoes are already paying dividends. Tomorrow’s a relatively short day; four hours’ walking, only two temples, and then a long wait for a rural village’s converted high school (it’s now a hikers’ lodge) to come pick me up and take me there for a night. I could use a slower day & it’s right around the corner - but for now, it’s time for a sleep.