A Walk in Rural Kochi

 

Late November, and on day 17 of my walk around Shikoku on the Ohenro pilgrimage I have left the Wakamiya Hachimangu shrine connected to the great Shikoku warlord Chosokabe Motochika and am heading across country to Tanemaji Temple 34.

This, for me, was the essence of the pilgrimage. The pilgrimage temples supply a structure and a route, but for me it is the space between the temples, the unknown expanses of mostly rural Japan that most visitors miss. I was seeking out the shrines and histories that don't make it into the tourist brochures.

I had been doing this for years, initially exploring the area around my home, gradually going further and further afield until I knew all the back roads and what could be found. I got into a pattern of studying maps and finding all the shrines and then working out a walking route that would take me to them all.

The impetus was to learn, to try to understand all the whys, why were things the way they were. To learn about the natural environment and its ecology and how that influenced the people, and to learn the political and religious history and how that shaped the place to be in the form it is now.

The Shikoku Ohenro was my first time on a "Buddhist" pilgrimage. I figured that dressed in pilgrims garb on a well established walking route I was less likely to be stopped by the cops, something that happened far too often to me and had a depressing effect on me.

The first photo is a small, local shrine, a Kamado Shrine. There were numerous kamado shrines in the area, indicating what I was not sure. The head shrine is in Dazaifu in northern Kyushu and was established after Japan's unsuccessful invasion of the Korean peninsula in the late 7th century.

photo 2 is a heron, a fairly common bird around rivers and rice paddies. Photo 3 is a small man-made pond, vital for irrigation for rice paddies before the modern world that nowadays uses a lot of electrical pumping.

 

Photo 4 is a small park of some kind, and photo 5 a gourd water bottle hanging on a farm outbuilding. A far cry from the ubiquitous plastic water bottles of now.

Phots 6, 7, and 8, are another small, local shrine, Mori Shrine. One of the things that fascinates me is the diversity of such things as the komainu guardian statues, which nowadays are tending more and more to a homogenous, "national" style, but which historically were quite varied.

photo 8 is the Kodono River I had to cross, and the finalthree photos are of an unusual memorial below a small local shrine. It seems to be dedicated to the ascension of Hirohito in 1926 when the era name changed from Taisho to Showa. Architecturally it is curious as it looks like some kind of tomb.

The previous post in this series looking at what is between the temples on the Ohenro was Wakamiya Hachimangu Shrine.