The Way of the 88 Temples: Journeys on the Shikoku Pilgrimage

4. Spirits

4 Spirits Just climb the mountain pass spring wind. —shji niwano I’d been lying on Katsurahama Beach, absorbed in the grating wash of the Pacific Ocean along the gravel shoreline, when Shūji crouched beside me. He held out his arms and opened his hands to reveal a stone in each palm. “Please, which one do you like?” he asked. I sat up, wondering if this was some kind of Japanese game. I studied the stones for a moment. Each was the size of a large egg. The one in Shūji’s left hand was light gray and ovoid. His right hand held a darker, slightly elongated stone with glints of mica. My impulse was to pick it up and press the ends to regain an egg-like perfection. “Kore,” I replied.“This one.” I tapped on the darker stone. Shūji dropped it in my hand.“It is for you,” he said.“To remind you of this place.” Shūji said he would add the other stone to his bonsai collection. “This will remind us of our visit here,” he explained. “This will be Robāto-san’s stone.” As he declared his intentions, I recalled the Japanese tradition of naming stones to commemorate an event or a person.“I am honored, Shūji,” I said.“And I will call this Shūji’s stone.” We sat for a few minutes in companionable silence, rolling the stones in our hands and watching the wide sweep of the ocean. Over the course of the last couple of weeks, we’d grown comfortable with  the way of the  temples each other and often had felt no need to talk. But then Katsurahama Beach was the kind of place where words seemed superfluous. It was about 7:30 a.m. An early morning haze blurred the distinction between sea and sky. A cool breeze came off the water as a long line of waves rolled one after the other onto the shore. A couple of freighters churned slowly westward across the horizon. We watched them until they went around a headland and out of sight. We’d spent the night at the Sekinoya Ryokan, an inn on the outskirts of Kōchi City near Sekkeiji, Temple Thirty-Three. It was an oldfashioned ryokan with a rock garden and a pond full of fat, colorful carp. I’d slept well after the previous day’s long walk through the suburbs of Kōchi and was looking forward to this day’s hike to Shōryuji, Temple Thirty-Six, in the foothills of Utsuga-san some thirty kilometers away. Before we headed out, though, Shūji wanted to take a short detour off the pilgrim path to show me one of his favorite places: Katsurahama Beach. The Japanese have long celebrated Katsurahama as a place of singular beauty. Located on the south coast of Shikoku near Kōchi City, the area’s deep-green pine forests, its multi-hued pebble shore, and the blue Pacific water inspired the poet Keigetsu Omichi to write this haiku: Watch the moon rise from the surface of the sea, drawing the attention of all on Katsurahama.¹ The place is also famous for its statue of one of Japan’s great heroes, Ryōma Sakamoto, the son of a nineteenth-century samurai family who fought to end the two-hundred-year reign of the Tokugawa Shōgunate and restore imperial rule in the 1860s. In 1853, U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry arrived with his Black Ships and forced Japan’s rulers to open the country to trade with the rest of the world. That event effectively ended two centuries of selfimposed isolation during which Japan had banned foreigners, except in a couple of port cities, and barred its own people from traveling to other countries. Sakamoto was one of the first Japanese intellectuals to argue that Japan had to learn the ways of the barbarians if it was to flourish. He studied Western political institutions and drafted a blue- spirits  print for a constitutional government and parliamentary democracy. He also wore European-style boots instead of sandals, arguing that since a samurai must always be ready to fight, boots were better than sandals. A fanatic assassinated the thirty-three-year-old Sakamoto in 1867, making him a martyr to Japan’s modernization. Statues throughout the country honor him. At Katsurahama...