Done the Camino? Try tackling Japan’s 88-temple Shikoku Trail

Bow respectfully at the temple gate. Cleanse hands and mouth at the fountain. Sound the bell. Leave a name slip with your wish in the main hall, light a candle and three sticks of incense, toss coins in the offering box, and chant sutras. Get your pilgrimage book stamped. Exit the gate, and bow again. Follow the red markers to the next temple.

Repeat 87 times.

Or not. On the Shikoku Henro, one of the longest pilgrim routes in Japan, there are many ancient customs but few hard-and-fast rules. You don’t even have to walk it: Many Japanese now take cars or bus tours; others ride trains or bikes. You can tackle the trail counterclockwise instead of clockwise. Or break the circuit into segments. You can wear the traditional white vest or look like an ad for REI—as most of us did on the small-group tour I joined last September to hopscotch a section of seven temples.

“Buddhism is more a way of life than a religion that tells you what you can or can’t do,” said David Moreton, a Shikoku-based researcher specializing in the Henro. “However, showing respect is important.”

Travelers’ interest in long-distance walks is at an all-time high. The famed Camino de Santiago in Spain saw a record 446,000 pilgrims last year. The Henro sees a fraction of that. Nevertheless, the numbers of walkers and foreign visitors seem to be rising.

The circular route crosses all four prefectures of Shikoku, Japan’s fourth largest island. As befits its evolution over a millennium, the Henro is a bit of a patchwork. The road to enlightenment runs through small family farms, busy highways, and suburban streets punctuated by vending machines. But the route also reveals expansive coastal views and Edo-period landscapes straight out of a Hiroshige woodblock print.

Visiting Shikoku’s 88-temple trail

The most obvious place to start was Temple 1, in Tokushima Prefecture in the island’s northeast. Next to its carp-filled pond, Jun Hashiba, a guide for Kyoto-based tour company Oku Japan, attempted to answer questions about how a Japanese monk born in the eighth century inspired the development of an over 700-mile circuit of 88 temples still in use more than a thousand years later. “Everyone knows Kukai; we study him in school,” said Hashiba.

Born on this island, Kukai founded one of the country’s more popular sects of Buddhism, called Shingon. He’s revered, but not only for his esoteric teachings, which are aptly named. “We mostly admire him for his abilities as a poet, scholar, and artist; he was a great calligrapher,” said Hashiba. The peripatetic and polymathic Kukai’s real-life feats morphed into the stuff of legend and eventually led to the popularization of the current route. Hashiba suggested the real answers would come once we started walking.

The four-mile section from Temple 20 to Temple 21 was lined with cathedral-high cypress, cedar, and bamboo. Rope-garlanded boulders, the embodiment of deities, kept us company, as did vermilion-bibbed stone statuettes, called jizo, which are guardians of children and travelers. Kukai, also called Kobo Daishi, was here too, personified in the pilgrim’s walking staff inscribed with words that translate to “traveling together.”

(These Japanese prayer plaques became symbols of hope.)

“When I walk, I sometimes think too much, but I keep walking, and then I think of nothing—in a good way,” said Tomoko Imaizumi, a guide who has made the pilgrimage four times.

At the Temple of the Great Dragon (21), a part of which dates from the 12th century, it was easy to see why so many religions built their altars atop mountains. In his writings, Kukai claimed to have climbed to the hilltop aerie and chanted mantras a million times. Despite Shingon Buddhism’s opacity, at its core is this: that everything is part of a cosmic whole and that enlightenment can be achieved by ordinary people. “I have received so many blessings from the Henro,” said Kizumi, a woman I met at Temple 6 (Temple of Everlasting Joy). She didn’t give me her last name, but she did press into my hand a pale green friendship bracelet made of string.

The trail’s culture of kindness

Indeed, pilgrims along the trail invariably spoke of the kindnesses of the locals. This is the culture of osettai, a unique feature of the Shikoku pilgrimage. “I experience this almost every day as a pilgrim,” said Imaizumi. “Usually it’s a mandarin or some sweets; one time a woman stopped her car and jumped out to give me 300 yen.”

Close to the Vulture Peak Temple (1), our group met Ranshu Yano, master of the dwindling art of ai-zome. The Tokushima region produces natural indigo for dyeing. Indigo textiles were once used in samurai clothing.

Yano invited us into his workshop to watch a portion of the painstaking process. He slid the lid off a large vat. The blue stew needed to be inspected, stirred, and allowed to ferment.

“It’s a living thing,” he said, holding up permanently blue hands. “I have to feel it.” The finished textiles are fashioned into exquisite kimonos.

(The mystery of Japan’s traditional washi paper.)

On the Henro, gifts come in all forms, not least of which is the chance to connect with people still tied to the land, still bound to artistry and traditions long abandoned in other places. “People have been doing what I do for a thousand years,” Yano said. “I stand in the middle, between the past and the future.”