Sam described the walk from Temple 1 to Temple 17 as being akin to the tutorial portion of a video game. In the tutorial, you have opportunities to learn how to move your character around the game space, how to encounter in-game characters and how to deal with obstacles. On our walk, we were learning how to navigate the pilgrim’s path, how to go through the rituals of candle and incense-lighting, name slip and coin-giving and chanting at the temples, and how to deal with a variety of challenges, from long distances and hills to the scarcity of lunch food or the difficulties of making inn reservations. The climb to Temple 12 was the “Boss Battle” in the tutorial where you are given a challenge that you might not actually be able to overcome. Fortunately, in our case, we survived.

As we headed back toward Tokushima, via Temples 13 through 17, we both also knew we needed a day of rest. So I booked us two nights in the hotel right next to the train station that we’d stayed in when we first arrived in the city. This time, I got Sam his own room and one for myself. Rest should be not just for the body but for the social muscles as well, and I knew that both of us could use down and quiet time.

Our Tokushima advisor, Don, recommended that we book our next two nights out of Tokushima in the town of Katsuura, near the base of the climb to Temple 20, Kakurinji. But when I called to see if I could book us two nights in any of the inns there, I learned that all were booked up. It turns out that the town was having the opening weekend of an extended doll festival, with folks coming in from as far away as Tokyo (where, we learned, it had been advertised on the subways and trains). My hoped for Friday and Saturday night bookings were impossible, and I was only able to land us rooms for two consecutive nights at what turned out to be a wonderful inn, “Mikan no yado,” at the foot of the climb up to Temple 20, for Sunday and Monday nights. So I had to extend our stay at the hotel in Tokushima two more nights.

This worked out well. Sam got extra down time and I got extra work time.  On our last day off in Tokushima we got the chance to do something really special. Don introduced us to his friend, Martin, a retired professor of literature whose passion is Japanese puppet theater. The puppet theater that is best known in the US is known as “Bunraku.” The kind of puppet theater they have in Tokushima, is closely related, but it is called “ningyo jôruri.”

Not at all a specialist, what I have to say here may not be quite the current consensus of scholars. Stepping into it recklessly, nevertheless, Bunraku is, in fact, a highly refined performative art. The puppets are intricately and beautifully made, the puppeteers and musicians are highly trained and highly prized and today many of the scripts are considered masterpieces. Rising in popularity during the early modern period (1600-1868) alongside its now-more-famous contemporary, Kabuki, Bunraku was strongly identified with Osaka and often led the way in theatrical development (scripts, theatrics, staging, etc.). Bunraku perfomances feature a singer singing/reading a script accompanied by a single shamisen player to the side of the stage, while a trio of three puppeteers manipulated each puppet (one controlling the head and right arm, one controlling the left arm and one controlling the legs). “Bunraku” literally means “pleasures of the text,” which foregrounds the scripts written by its playwrights, the most famous of whom was Chikamatsu Monzaemon, the “Shakespeare of Japan.”

Bunraku, however, is simply a fairly localized (to Osaka) version of “ningyo jôruri,” ningyo meaning “puppet” or “doll” and jôruri meaning a style of narrative storytelling featuring a singer “telling” a story (through song and speech) and an accompanying musician. The distinction between Bunraku and ningyo jôruri, in other words, is, for a lay person like me, subtle at best, but, even for me, noticeable. Let’s call “Bunraku” the highly professionalized version and ningyo jôruri the broadly practiced art form. These days, puppet theater can be found throughout Japan, but is most strongly associated with Osaka, Awaji Island (stretching between Osaka and Shikoku) and Tokushima Prefecture, all located on the eastern end of the Inland Sea. However, as Martin told us, if you want to see puppet theater in Japan today, you can either try to catch one of four annual performances of Bunraku in Osaka, or you can come to Tokushima and see it everyday of the year.

We arranged to meet Martin on Saturday at the Awa Jurobe Yashiki Puppet Theater and Museum around 1:30 for a tour of the museum and a viewing of a famous scene by a local troupe. We toured a small, but fascinating, museum with examples of a range of puppet heads, costumes and informative videos. We learned that Tokushima ningyo jôruri puppet heads are larger than those of the Bunraku theater in Osaka, that performing troupes feature people of all ages and genders (the performance we saw was entirely done by women, something that is nearly unthinkable in Osaka Bunraku), and that there are around 80 villages in Tokushima Prefecture with puppet stages at local shrines that are still used regularly. We heard, again and again, expressions of modesty that (falsely) claimed there isn’t much going on in Tokushima, but the pride in the living tradition of puppet theater was palpable.

The scene we saw that Saturday afternoon was the most famous scene from one of the most famous plays (full plays are almost never performed). The play is “The Hymn of a Pilgrim,” and the scene was Act 8. Putting together the story from Martin and materials we received, a samurai man, Jurobe, was assigned to go undercover into a gang of thieves in Osaka to try to recover a sword stolen from his lord in Awa (present-day Tokushima Prefecture). He and his wife leave their infant daughter with his mother and set up home in Osaka. But through the act of playing a bad man, Jurobe became an actual thief. As Act 8 comes around, his wife, Oyumi, is at home, aware that the police are on the lookout for Jurobe and his family and that when they catch them they will be executed for their actual crimes. While sitting at home doing her sewing, Oyumi hears the voice of a young girl at her door, asking for help. She is a 10 year-old who speaks the dialect of Awa (where, of course, Oyumi and Jurobe come from). The girl—again, may I stress that she is 10!—is on a pilgrimage, alone, hoping to find her parents. It doesn’t take Oyumi long to figure out that this girl, Otsuru, is her daughter and now the scene develops as the tragedy of a mother. Remember, Oyumi knows that when the police find them, they will execute the whole family, so she struggles with the desire to reveal herself to her daughter as the mother she has been looking for and her desire to spare her from the fate Oyumi knows is inescapable for Jurobe and herself. In the end, her protective instincts win out and she sends Otsuru away, denying her desire in order to protect her life. Of course, since this is a tragedy, Oyumi’s self-restraint is not rewarded. In the next scene, Jurobe, coming home, encounters Otsuru and, recognizing her as an easy mark, but not as his daughter, decides to relieve her of her traveling funds. But as Otsuru realizes what is happening, she begins to call out for help. Jurobe covers her mouth to silence her, but is too rough and smothers her. Leaving her dead on the road and taking her money, he returns home to find his wife in tears with the story of their daughter’s reappearance.

A real weeper and a bit too melodramatic to wring tears from me, even though I sit next to my son throughout, I can see nonetheless how this play would be powerfully moving to audiences, and also why Act 9 is never performed. As Martin said, who wants to watch a father mistakenly murder his daughter? Still, we sat in the front row of a tiny theater and could see everything really well, performed by women who threw themselves into their roles and whose commitment to the art was at least as moving to me as the story they performed. And for Sam, this was his first experience with Japanese puppet theater, in a setting as intimate as one could ask for.

After the performance, we went into the museum with Martin who gave us a hands on tour of the puppets on display, letting Sam hold a puppet as the lead puppeteer would. Meanwhile, a teacher took over the theater and started her class for a group of men and women, ranging in age from single digits to post retirement. We returned to the theater to watch the class practice a comedic scene from a play featuring two shrine priests dancing, one seriously, the other with a knowing glance at the audience conveying his disdain for his overly serious partner. The thing that was most impressive was that it takes three people to operate a puppet, so in making the puppet dance, all three had to coordinate their movements with each other quite precisely.

After watching for awhile, they invited Sam up to give it a try. Eventually, I was called up as well and for the next half hour or so, we played with the puppets and our fellow, far more advanced, learners, learning to kick the dance moves, flick the fans and make the puppets heads move to ridiculous flair. Forty years into this Japan studies thing and this was the first time I had an opportunity to hold and move one of these puppets. If you come to Japan and can find a way to get to Tokushima, make sure to visit this little community-based museum!

The next day, Sunday, we headed out for Katsuura, passing through Temples 18 and 19 and dragging ourselves into our inn, after a long 14 mile day. We were staying two days, so Monday was set aside for a day to explore the area without our packs. As I said above, the area was known for a big doll festival (March 3 was the beginning), but also for a temple known as an “Okunoin” or Inner Sanctum of one of the 88 temples on our trip. I suspected that the Okunoin in this area was one where my group had had a memorable experience when I first traveled the area 40 years ago, so I sort of coerced Sam into taking the 16 mile round trip up a river valley to a temple called Jigenji. There was some kind of doll museum in the town that we were both interested in seeing after our experiences with the puppet theater, but first we had another mountain to climb.

The first four kilometers were fine, a long steady not-especially challenging incline along a crystal clear river. At mile 4, we arrived at the village of Sakamoto where we encountered two things: the beginning of a steep three-mile climb to Jigenji and a mountain village that had completely decked itself out with doll displays along the street and in the Hachiman shrine. Hachiman is the deification of Emperor Ojin, also associated with warriors and monkeys, not necessarily a place associated with comedy. But our steep climb began with an unforgiving long, long, long stone staircase, passing through three torii gates, leading up to a shrine grounds packed with doll displays. Large stuffed dolls crammed into the branches of trees, racks and racks of dolls sitting in attendance of the spectacle of us visitors, round dumpling-shaped dolls climbing ropes  lining the path to the main building of the shrine. Literally thousands of dolls.

My prior encounters with these doll festival displays was with settings in which the dolls sat in dignified pairs (man and woman) as if they were ancient court nobles. But these displays (indeed, the displays in front of houses and stores throughout the village) were distinctly comedic. Dolls holding miniature cotton candy and ice cream. Dolls posed in off-kilter dance poses with kimono hiked up to the knees. Flirting dolls and goof-ball dolls. A comedic sensibility ran through most of the displays. Up at the main shrine building, we encountered a paper sign posted on the side of the main hall that encouraged us to laugh. “A day when you are angry or depressed or serious is the same as any other. A day when you laugh is a day worth living. Come laugh with these dolls!”

The rest of the hike up to Jigenji was interesting and breath-taking (literally…). But honestly, the doll takeover of the Hachiman Shrine in Sakamoto was the highlight of the day. As we descended from the heights of Jigenji, looking back to Katsuura, hoping to get back in time to see the doll museum in town, we pushed our once-again tired bodies to the max. But we arrived at the doll museum at 4:15 to find that it had closed at 4:00 pm. We spied a side door that was open and sneaked in for a glimpse. It appeared to be quite the mountain of dolls in a large warehouse setting, but despite our disappointment at not getting inside in time, we both felt that encountering the dolls in the mountain village of Sakamoto was a better experience.

I don’t know what to make of the dolls we’ve encountered in any larger cultural interpretation. We’re just observing at the moment that we see dolls everywhere and in every conceivable situation. I’ll close this post with two more doll encounters.

At Temple 23, Yakuoji, we finally left the mountains and hit the coastline. From 23 to 24, Hotsumisakiji, was 77 kilometers of shadeless coastline, a long haul that many, including us, will shorten with a train or bus ride along the way. We took a short train ride from our last inn in Tokushima to the northeastern most town in Kochi Prefecture and then began our long walk. It is a mix of pleasant coastline and unpleasant highway walking. It is also a walk through an area with constant markers of death. I’ve been stopping to read as many monuments and signs as possible, which is one of the things that makes us so slow. And the recurring theme of these markers is stories of people who died in the ocean, whether from storms or fishing accidents or tsunami. As one walks through kilometer after kilometer of these markers, the precarity of life in the area becomes palpable. Down at Cape Muroto, there are houses that are built inside thick, high concrete walls to protect them from the savage typhoons that hit the region.

I’m not sure if this is related, but we started to encounter something truly chilling along the highway: weather-beaten toys, usually stuffed animals, tied to chain link fences facing the ocean. Given the prevalence of toys in the spaces marked for the consolation of the spirits of the dead, for example the toys given to Jizo  statues dedicated to the souls of lost children, whether through miscarriage or abortion or stillbirth, I couldn’t see these toys lashed to fences, facing the harsh sea and sun, as anything other than attempts to console those who died at sea. I was reminded of an article by a friend of mine, Ellen Schottschneider, about dolls given to Yasukuni Shrine—the shrine dedicated to war dead—to serve as doll brides to the souls of young men who died at war, unmarried. The toys on the fences of Highway 55 along the east coast of Cape Muroto did not appear to literally be replacement humans, but they did appear to be placed there for the pleasure of someone who couldn’t physically take them up.

Finally, for this post, this afternoon, Sam and I took a short train ride from the station at the bottom of the hill from Temple 27 to the station closest to our inn for that night, Ioki Station. When we got off the train, we immediately spotted a sign pointing in the direction of Ioki Cave. Well, we were a little early for our check in, so we decided to check it out, since it wasn’t that far away. We were astonished to find a deep arroyo nestled into the Kochi hillside that seemed a landscape from the age of the dinosaurs. We walked along a path through this landscape, emerging at the top of three waterfalls to find a farming landscape. As we walked along through this bucolic scene, we spied a group of life-sized dolls sitting on  benches and then we noticed a sign on the side of a building inviting us into “Kakashi House.” We looked around the corner and spied a modern barn full of life-sized dolls, old (really old) farm equipment, and an elderly woman puttering around in the back. I had been pondering how to make sense of the dolls we kept seeing, seemingly everywhere we looked.

I had spent the earlier part of the afternoon listening to the life history of a man we’d fallen in with on the path, who had been through a lot in his life, and I was feeling up to another conversation, so I asked the woman if we could come in. We spent the next 30 minutes in her barn, looking through old baskets, threshers, juice pressers, mat weavers and so on. She also told me a short version of her life: how she had come to this village as a bride over 60 years ago, how she had walked the pilgrimage herself over 50 years ago, how she hoped to make it to Mt.Koya one more time before she dies and how she had put this little museum of old farm tools together. She told me of moving to the town, of her recent medical issues and of these farm implements and the memories she had of using them as a child.

”Tell me about all these dolls!” I said.

”Oh, my good friends and I made them all! We had so much fun making them, placing them everywhere!” She replied.

She praised us for walking. We told her we’d pray that she could go to Mt. Koya , Kobo Daishi’s monastery in Wakayama, one more time before she dies, as she told us she’d pleaded with her daughter. I got her to be in a picture with Sam, even as she moaned that she was now, at 85, mostly wrinkles.

Still, with all she’d lived through, her pleasures and losses, she told us she was living as she wanted to now. We said our goodbyes and I thought how much I wanted to take her to Mt. Koya myself. As we walked through the rice paddies, waiting for their spring flooding, past the benches with dolls seated in laughing and gossiping groups, leaning on each others’ shoulders, we felt grateful that she talked with us for so long and that she wished us well, so sincerely.

The dolls, on this day, were wishing us well.