Shikoku Part 2: Oh, the People we Met and the Adventures we Had!

The 88 Temple Walk -- “Hachijuhakkasho” – was a marvelous experience, an amazing combination of nature and spirituality.  But that was only half of it:  what made our walk truly memorable were the people we met and the adventures we had. Many of our experiences revolved around the sea and food:  Since we were on the coast, we were treated to all kinds of the freshest fish imaginable.   And we experienced a kind and giving spirit unlike anything I’ve ever seen.  Let’s just say this would never happen in New York!

"Milk Bottle" temple

Just as we sometimes labeled a temple (“Milk Bottle” because of its red and white bottle-like pagoda) or road (a crowded “Boston Post Road”), we identified people.  For example, “Gabriella’s boyfriend” was an 82-year old man who had done the pilgrimage 5 times and told people he was our guide.  “Tokyo lady” was a seemingly unfriendly woman from Tokyo, traveling alone, who blushed and giggled when we gave her a Kleenex pack in a cloth case as an o-settai.

Minshuku Lady.  One night we stayed at a minshuku, ostensibly a guesthouse but I think really the home of a widow who was letting out rooms.  We were the only guests and had the top floor to ourselves.  The minshuku was a bit tired looking but it was spacious with a lovely view of the sea.  It also had one of the more interesting toilets we’d seen, sort of a cross between an airplane toilet and a garden hose; but that is another story. 

Minshuku dinner with asari

We spent lots of time with the woman we dubbed “Minshuku Lady”, who spoke in a rough accent that Gabriella had trouble understanding.  In her mid 70’s, the woman swam in the sea every day as she had for decades.  She was a chatterbox, we think because she didn’t have many visitors and her son lived in another town and didn’t visit much.  She also was very motherly, hovering over us as we ate a huge home-cooked meal.  The meal included some small crab and a pile of fresh, raw, snail-like shellfish called “asari”.  On our way into the village, we had seen people who digging for some kind of shellfish; what we ate couldn’t have been out of the water more than an hour or two.  They were delicious!

Sea Urchin Madam.  One sunny morning as we strolled in a little fishing village, we ran into an older woman by the shore.  In easily understandable Japanese, we learned that she had a daughter, a medical research doctor, who had just moved to New York from Hong Kong.  We had a lovely conversation with this kind woman, then thanked her and turned to go on. 

A few steps later she called us back:  she had seen a sea urchin in the water below her dock, and wanted to show us this expensive delicacy.  As we watched, she took a long pole with three prongs on the end, stooped down, took aim, and stabbed at the sea urchin until she caught it.  Slowly she raised it and put it on the dock in front of us.  She told us this was the first sea urchin she had caught by herself, since usually her husband was the hunter.  Next she went into her house, got a pair of large, somewhat rusty clippers, and took off some of the spikes and cut into the flesh.  Then she got chopsticks, carefully picked out the sea urchin’s flesh, and put it on a plate with a bit of soy sauce.  We thought – or feared – she would have us eat it, but instead she said it needed to be cleaned first.  It may be she wanted the delicacy herself, as fresh and tasty as can be.

The people living on Shikoku eat very well and inexpensively just from the fish they catch in the sea.  We saw – and ate – a lot of different and unusual fish, mostly raw, and they were all wonderful.

Nokyo-cho Monk.  The monks or hired people who sealed and signed our temple books didn’t have a very exciting job, at least to us.  They would sit from morning to night, signing books, scrolls, and sometimes cloth banners.  Some pilgrims, like us, had only one book, while others might have two or three.  When a henro bus group came, the nokyo-cho ka was faced with 40 or 50 books to sign in 10-15 minutes.  As a result, they varied a good deal in temperament, from somewhat dour to quite kind, calling a cab for us if asked, smiling, or even talking a bit.

Well-done calligr

Not so good calligraphy

Early in the morning after spending the night at a temple, we went to the nokyo-cho.  No one else was around, and the monk, roughly in his late 30’s/early 40’s, was kind and happy to talk with us.   Somehow the topic turned to kanji, the Chinese characters the Japanese adopted as the basis for their written language.  While we both love kanji, most Japanese hate it because of the repetitive way they are taught it in school.  The monk spoke eloquently about the beauty of kanji and writing it.  He said that Kanji is about balance:  each character’s components have basic geometric forms.  They are put together in certain ways so that the entire character looks balanced within the square space that each kanji is written in.  He talked about other types of balance in kanji – of black and white, filled and empty space, thin and thick lines, curved and angular shapes, meaning and picture.  His comments reminded me of my friend Shigeko’s discussion of the aesthetic of tanka – of the balance and beauty one strives to achieve in 31 syllables.   The Japanese aesthetic is so pervasive!

The Noble Scallop.   One morning as we walked, a woman ran out from her shop carrying mikan oranges to give us as an o-settai (gift to pilgrims).  We thanked her for the wonderful fruit, chatted a bit and went on.  Several yards later, we heard her running after us, calling out.  She had brought us a 2-pound bag of barnacle-like shellfish. “Eat them today,” she said in Japanese.  “They won’t be any good tomorrow.”  Laden down and thankful, we trod on. 

At lunch we stopped at a little henro shelter where two male henro were eating.  First we shared some fresh sugar snap beans we had bought.  They were surprised we were eating them raw, so we showed them how to string the bean and they found the vegetable was actually quite good.  Next we shared the fish o-settai the woman had given us.  She had shown us how to eat them:  break off the shell from the softer end, pull out the fish, and pop it into your mouth.  They were fabulous, fresh as the sea itself and tasty.  We all ate what we could, then gave the rest to the proprietor of the shop next to the shelter.  Since he came from the area, he knew what we was getting and was delighted.  He told us the name and we looked it up in our little electronic dictionary:  it was a “noble scallop”.

The Best Adventure of All.   Along the coast southwest of Kochi is a lovely hot springs called Kuroshio Honjin, which is also known for its food.  Gabriella and I decided to go there for lunch and a bath on a warm and sunny day. 

View from Kuroshio Honjin

First we had lunch in the restaurant overlooking the sea.  We had “hatsue no tataki”, seared, almost raw bonito that tastes like steak and melts like butter in your mouth.  It’s a specialty of the area.  We’d had it a couple of times at the shukubo (temple lodgings) where we’d stayed, and I especially liked it.  This time it was fantastic.  It had been lightly smoked, and you could actually smell the smoke (a gentle odor) and almost feel it swirling around in your mouth as you ate the fish.  

Gabriella, Mie-san, and me

Next, we went to the bath.  When we entered, a woman was already washing herself and shortly after stepped outdoors into the rock-sided hot bath looking out onto the Pacific.  Gabriella went in, too, and when I followed she was already in conversation with the woman, named Mie-san.  As we got out and dressed, Mie-san asked us to wait upstairs with her until her husband came out from his bath.  I thought she had said they would drive us back to town, which meant we didn’t have to walk back through the hot tunnel with traffic coming at us, but I misunderstood.

Turtle at Konkofukuji Temple

Konfukuji Temple gro

It turned out that Mie-san and her husband, whose name we didn’t catch, wanted to drive us two hours down the coast to their favorite temple, Kongofukuji (#38) at the tip of Shikoku on the Ashizurimisaki Cape. I had wanted to go down the cape, but we had reluctantly decided the distance was too great, even by train.  Instead, we planned to go to the temple near the hot springs and had reservations there to stay overnight.  “Cancel them!” said the husband.  “Can we do that?” we asked.  “Isn’t it improper?”  No, they assured us firmly, and off we went.  First we went to the temple – briefly, it wasn’t very interesting – and Mie-san and her husband explained to the surprised matron that we were cancelling our reservation.  Then we took off, Mie-san’s husband, an excellent driver, negotiating the winding road south.  We were both stunned and delighted by their generosity.

Mie-san's husband looking at the Pacific

We arrived shortly before 5, when the temple would close.  We hurried to get our books stamped, and spent a few minutes walking around the lovely grounds, patting the lovely stone turtle that is a symbol of long life and fertility.  Then we walked to the cape – a beautiful, windy promontory from which you could see the Pacific extend forever to the horizon and beyond.  We were thrilled.

 

Supermarket fish

And then we drove back, for Mie-san had insisted that we come to their house for dinner and stay the night.  We stopped at a supermarket to pick up fixings for dinner.  The market was huge to us, but Mie-san’s husband said this was actually small.  There was a seemingly infinite variety of fish, all with fresh clear eyes and glistening skin.  We picked some up and headed home.  There Mie-san prepared a lovely dinner of make your own sashimi.  We took a small sheet of nori (seaweed), spread some rice on top, added some fish or vegetables, rolled it up like a taco, dipped it in soy sauce with wasabi, and ate.  It was wonderful and much fun. 

It was clear that Mie and her husband had a great relationship.  They chatted easily and comfortably between themselves, laughed, figured out how they were going to do things.  As we talked, we learned that they liked to pick up strangers and bring them home to dinner.  They enjoyed meeting new people and were exceedingly generous.

Gabriella and me at Shikoku's southern tip

Their house was relatively new and a lovely combination of Japanese and Western. It was built somewhat like a compound, with a teahouse at the entry way and the house in back.  The living room, dining room and kitchen were western, with table, chairs and sofa, while the bedrooms at the other end of the house had tatami mats and futons.  Mie-san’s husband explained that this was not his family’s home, though he had been born and raised in the town (something we discovered was fairly typical).  As the third son he had to make his own way – he owned a motorbike shop and loved to cycle and his wife worked part-time with him – while the first-born son would have the family house.

The next day, we got up and had a simple breakfast, and after watching the daily morning 20-minute soap opera drama, Mie-san’s husband left for work.  Mie-san then drove us the few miles to the next temple we had planned to see, which turned out to be only a few minutes from their house.   They had persuaded us to cancel that reservation as well, and now I understood why.  Then we bid a fond good by and were on our way.