Sometime in the fall of 2022, Sam and I were standing at the base of a long stone staircase somewhere in Kyoto, looking up, unable to see the top. It might have been at Mt. Kurama, but I think it was at Tanukidani. We were beginning to learn that climbing stone stairs would be a regular experience in Japan. I turned to Sam and said, “I’m going to teach you a useful Japanese word: ‘kakugo.’”

Like many words, it has several nuances. My first association with the word is that it refers to a state of clarity, of preparedness for a potentially difficult challenge ahead. It expresses a resolve to go into the pending task or situation without illusions, acknowledging the fact that completion may come with emotional and physical costs. In this sense it evokes a positive determination to embrace a challenge. It is the kind of thing I can imagine an underdog team shouting in the locker room as they are about to take the field against a heavy favorite: “Let’s kakugo!”

At Otani University’s website for “Buddhist terms in everyday life,” the author of the entry for “kakugo” complains that in the modern era the term has often been understood by contemporary Japanese to articulate a passive acceptance of an impending disaster.

“When Japanese say ‘it is time to kakugo’ ,” the author writes, “it is something to worry about. Nowadays it is about the need to expand domestic demand in the face of economic crisis. Earlier, we saw the era in which slogans like ‘Luxury is the enemy’ and ‘We will want for nothing until victory’  united 100 million in kakugo. We must not forget the disaster those slogans brought to this country.”

The “disaster” referenced here is World War II, when ordinary Japanese were pushed to sacrifice everything in order to win a war against enemies with overwhelming advantages in materiel, productivity and population. The tone was something like, “The time has come to make the fateful decision to sacrifice everything, every life if necessary, for the defense of the fatherland and the emperor.” This lay the responsibility for victory or defeat on the shoulders of ordinary folk who then freighted every personal decision with the weight of the whole nation. The memory of that weight is one of the things that has carried the determination of those who survived the war (and those who listened to them) to resist any return of militarism in Japan.

The author rebukes this use of the word “kakugo” and mourns its reemergence as a crisis word. In opposition, the writer reminds the reader of the Buddhist meaning of the word: “to escape from confusion and awaken to the truth.” One of the meanings of the character “kaku” is to awaken (sameru), which is, in the Buddhist context, to awaken to the truth. Likewise “go” means to realize, perceive or understand (satoru). English speakers with some familiarity with Buddhism may know the word “satori” as enlightenment. That’s the idea conveyed by the “go” in “kakugo.” Both terms evoke enlightenment, the realization of Truth. This is still a weighty term for it describes a life-changing awakening, not some simple realization. But instead of leading to self-nullification, it promises liberation.

There is one more wrinkle to what the word “kakugo” can mean. The meanings of “kaku” and “go” that I have given so far convey a sense of a process that moves into the future. Awakening is a process and we tend to imagine that process either being fulfilled in an as yet un-arrived future or as being our guide for our current and future selves. But while “kaku” can mean “awaken” (pronounced “sameru”), it also means “remember” (pronounced “oboeru”). As a historian, in fact, whenever I see the character “kaku” alone, unaccompanied by “go” or any other compound, my first expectation is that it is referring to memory of the past. I’ll leave it to the reader to think about how “memory of the past” and “awakening (with repercussions for the future?)” can reside in the same character. I don’t have a good answer. Just my own story.

In mid-June of 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was in its fourth month, I was in a bad way. At the university where I work, we all suddenly had to pivot our teaching and administrative work to remote formats. Class preps now took two to three times longer than they had before. Now that we didn’t have to calculate travel times from one place on campus to another, meetings started and ended on the hour, butting up one against the other. I may have been in sweat pants all day, but I sat in my chair clicking into and out of zoom meetings, with just a couple of minutes for bathroom breaks or quick snacks, working from the moment I rolled out of bed until I fell back in.

Then, in late March, my mother, who we had moved out to Santa Cruz from New Hampshire five years earlier, suffered a massive stroke. Undiscovered for probably about four hours, she was airlifted to Stanford where they undertook a procedure to dissolve the clot that fell her. It kept her alive, but not able to communicate and not with much hope of recovery. She was transported back to Santa Cruz to the hospital for a spell and then, ultimately, back to her apartment for hospice care. My days got even more complicated as I tried to handle work and whatever care for my mother I could deliver, in addition to all those decisions one has to make for someone who has lost all ability to care for themselves. I wound up recording my lectures for the class I was supposedly teaching often late at night, after midnight, in the time I had left before collapse.

By mid-June, as the quarter ended, I was suffering from debilitating back pain and my mother was slipping away. I made an appointment with my doctor to get something for my back and found a man alarmed by my weight gain and blood pressure rise. He did blood work and informed me I was now in Type II Diabetes territory. Weighing 284 pounds, blood pressure at something like 148 over 110, he started to read me the riot act.

“How much do you work,” he asked.

“If I’m awake, I’m working,” I said, “something like 16 hours a day.”

“How many days a week do you work,” he asked.

I, rolling my eyes, said, “All seven” (as if someone who worked 16 hour days would take a day off).

“I’m telling you right now,” he said, “you are a candidate for a stroke. I’ve seen men your age overworking and dying from strokes. If you don’t cut back on your work, lose weight and address your blood pressure and blood sugars, I will write a ‘doctor’s orders’ letter to your boss.”

That evening, June 23rd, my mother passed away.

June is often the month when I most struggle with depression. The intensity of spring quarter ends suddenly with graduation and for just a couple of months the demands on my time seem to ease up, or at least it feels like they should. I am high functioning in this depression, meaning I can do lots of things…except work and talk to people (or answer email). I can exercise regularly (I often lose weight during the summer), eat better and give myself space to indulge in the pleasures of reading fiction. What I can’t do well is work. But the work doesn’t disappear during the summer and as we get later into the season and autumn looms, I feel so much regret for the “wasted time” during which my productivity plummeted. I am only now learning to see that condition as burnout.

This time, as the doctor’s tone played in my brain on “ear worm loop,” I thought of how hard I found it to take care of myself, to prioritize my health and happiness, and of the toll it had taken on me. Every summer for the past five years (at least), I had vowed to exercise and eat well, and was successful at doing so. But the moment the school year began again, I proved unable to sustain that. Work came first, exercise, nutrition and rest happened if there was time. Now the bill had come.

So I thought for awhile. My exercise, for the most part, had been done in the service of weight loss. I could, and did, find pleasures at times in the feeling of growing stronger, or in the speed I could catch as I rode my bike in the hills of Santa Cruz, or in the buoyancy I love in the water. But I don’t think happiness was the main driver. I was honestly more focused on health as a form of self-improvement, a process that might offer happiness in the future (when I reached the appropriately improved state of being), but wasn’t necessarily in service of happiness now. Often, to be honest, I also thought of self-improvement as a way to become more productive. The thought now makes me cringe.

The desire for weight loss was not strong enough to displace whatever it was in my work that made me drop self-care into my lowest priority. What was there that I could want badly enough that it could hold top place for me as the academic year workload returned in the fall?

It took me awhile—looking back at my communications, it seems it was about six months—but eventually I remembered my experience on the Shikoku Pilgrimage in 1983. It shouldn’t have been hard to remember. It was a pivotal moment in my life. The experience of walking two weeks, or about one-quarter, of the pilgrimage as a 20 year-old, one month into my first stay in Japan set the desire to explore Japan and its history deep in my bones. I still had the walking staff (kongozue) and used it whenever I went walking in the woods.

But I had only walked the first 23 of 88 temples. It was unfinished business. When the memory came to me, I was overwhelmed by the desire to complete the pilgrimage. At the same time, I knew I was in no shape to do it right then. The pilgrimage route is somewhere in the neighborhood of 800 miles, give or take a few dozen. If I was going to finally walk the whole thing, to complete the thing that I had left unfinished for nearly 40 years, I was going to have to train for it. And here, it seemed to me, was the thing that I wanted badly enough to make training for it my highest priority. It would probably take me a couple of years of lots and lots of walking to get myself in shape to do so. And happily, I could do that walking in a place—Santa Cruz—with an overabundance of beautiful green space. Training for a future happiness could be built through present happiness.

So I started walking in December 2020…with family, with friends, with colleagues and alone.

I dug around some boxes in my closet and pulled out an old photo of me at the start of the trip, up on Mt. Kôya, taken by my friend, Kyle MacKay.

Also in that box were my sedge hat (sugegasa) and white pilgrim’s coat (hakui). I took them out and made a little shrine in the corner of my study to my goal of going back.

I positioned the shrine to the side of my desk, so it would be always on the edge of my vision, reminding me of what is important to me. I calculated that I’d be able to take a year of sabbatical in 2022-23. It also so happened that just as the sabbatical ended I would turn 60, on September 3, 2023.

With that, I saw a vision of a circle. Sixty is a big landmark in Asia. In Japan it is called the “kanreki”, the year the calendar returns to its beginnings. The twelve animals of the zodiac, rotating through the five elements, means that when one reaches sixty one has been through all the possible combinations of time (zodiac animal + natural element). One returns to the beginning. I had unfinished business from my twentieth year and until 2023 to finish it. The finish would come in walking a circle that doesn’t really have a beginning or an end. Sure, there are temples numbered from 1 to 88, but one can start at any one, go in any direction and, having done the circuit, just keep going.

I confess at first this was an entirely selfish plan. I was determined to walk it whether I had company or not. I gingerly pitched the family on the idea and while they were interested, in the end it turned out that for this trip only my youngest son, Sam, would be able to join me. His life schedule and mine are in sync—he just graduated from high school and is taking a gap year while I am on sabbatical—and so we decided to take the plunge together.

We decided to “Kakugo!”

I write this from a hotel room in Kyoto as Sam and I recover from jet lag, pick up last minute necessaries and make the reservations for our first nights on this journey. It will be a longer walk, both overall and on a daily basis, than anything we’ve done before. Nearly 60 year-old me will be walking with my nearly 19 year-old son, both of us seeing what we are capable of doing and where we might be heading to next. We don’t know what will come or if we can finish this. We don’t know what we will learn about Japan or ourselves. But as I intend to explore, we hope to awaken from some things—our self-doubts especially—and come to some understandings. For me it will be a mix of memory and the unfamiliar, of carrying things and letting things go. I’ll let Sam tell me what it is for him.

It is Sunday, February 19th today. We start on Wednesday, with a trip up to the top of Mt. Kôya to stay a night in the temple where I stayed almost 40 years ago. On Thursday, we cross to Shikoku, to stay one night in the city of Tokushima.

On Friday, the walking finally begins…