The path from Temples 5 through 7 was, at times, depressing. Lots of homes and stores were shuttered and a surprising amount of farm land was converted into land for solar panels. One of the photos I regret not taking was one that would have showed a cartoon image of wild boars and monkeys wreaking havoc in farm fields while the farming family looked on in frustration and dismay. “Why struggle with wild boars and monkeys over your crops when you can turn your land over to solar panels?” the sign asked. The next day, along the path from Temples 8 through 10, we saw among what looked to be far more prosperous farmland, a sign urging farmers to preserve agriculture for future generations. I could see that the struggle in the area was not only between farmers and their animal foes, but also amongst the farmers themselves over the future of land use.

That sign came to mind again a few days ago as we were walking along a mountain path in the southwestern tip of Shikoku near the Ashizuri Peninsula. In the previous days, as we headed south to Temple 38 at the very tip of Cape Ashizuri, we had seen increasing signs of recent activity of wild boars. The main tell is ground that has been turned over by a powerful snout and tusks, looking for delicious things to eat. The side of the road about 2 kilometers from Temple 38 was full of overturned dirt and rough animal tracks up into the woods above the road. In the small town with the temple itself there were many signs on the side of the road warning that we were in an area with active nocturnal boars.

On this particular day, on a path through the mountain woods from Cape Ashizuri to the town of Tatsukushi, we walked among endless troughs of overturned dirt and leaves, as well as shallow holes that looked like they’d been dug by a tusk.

At the bottom of the path we encountered a farmer who was cooking bamboo shoots in a pot over an open fire. He gave us some “konatsu,” a citrus fruit and we got to talking.

I said, “It sure looks like you’ve got a lot of wild boars in the mountains up here. You have any trouble with them?”

“Oh yeah,” he sighed. “I had to build a wall around my fields to keep them out.”

”Could you show me what they look like,” I asked. And he agreed to give me a short tour of his fields out behind his house, surrounded, indeed, by a stout, multi-layered metal fence.

”And this keeps them out?”

”It works on the wild boars,” he replied. “I cover the fruit with bags to defend them from the crows and I wrap the base of the trees in tin to protect them from the badgers.”

”Deer problems, too?”

”Yeah, but they just take off the freshest new leaves from the end of the branches,” he said, showing me a branch of his konatsu tree nipped short.

Wild boars have been a running theme of our walks. Back in Tokushima prefecture, we saw a report about a 70 year-old woman who had been attacked by a wild boar, during the morning news that played during our breakfast at the inn near Temple 11. About a week later, Sam and I were walking up a mountain path to visit an “okunoin” (inner sanctum) of Temple 20, called Jigenji, when we heard a loud snuffling and snorting on the hill about 25 feet above us. We froze and held hard to our staffs, wondering if they would be any use of that sound turned out to be a wild boar irritated by our presence. (For what it is worth, it turned out to be a narrow water pipe feeding a mountain stream into a concrete catchment.) Then, as we rounded the southwestern corner of Shikoku, in our final days of walking Kochi Prefecture and as we began our walk in southern Ehime Prefecture, we not only saw the signs of their hunt for food, but we spotted several large boar traps sitting by the side of the path, unbaited. We found ourselves wanting to see one in the wild, yet definitely not wanting to see them.

In early January, Sam and I had climbed Mt. Hiei, in the northeastern corner of Kyoto. About halfway up we encountered a troupe of monkeys hanging out amongst a bunch of large stones and boulders, near a sign designating the site the ruins of an ancient castle. On our second day on Shikoku, we ran into a solo monkey on the grounds of Oasahiko Shrine, which we explored after leaving the museum to the German POW camp. But we’ve seen no monkeys since, even though we see stories of monkeys everywhere, such as the story of the giant monkey and hunter graves I related in an earlier post.

As I reflect back on our journey so far, I’m struck by how much time we have spent looking at and thinking about animals. Temple 23 is in the town of Hiwasa which has a sandy beach used by sea turtles to lay their eggs, as well as a pretty good museum and aquarium dedicated to them.

This was the first of several sea turtle beaches, one of the more spectacular was Okinohama, just above the Ashizuri Peninsula. Temples 38 and 40 both featured sea turtle statues and in the mini-park around the lighthouse on Cape Ashizuri there was a site that told a story of how Kobo Daishi called a bunch of sea turtles to help him cross to a large offshore rock that he named after the deity Fudo Myoo, the unmovable.

And it was near Tatsukushi that we spied a dead sea turtle washed up against a sea wall, its shell almost hollowed out by scavengers.

We’ve been walking close to the coast since Temple 23 in Hiwasa, but both of us have been struck by the near total absence of gulls. Coming from a beach town that is full of them, it struck us as odd that the sounds of the ocean did not include the distinctive calls of the gulls. Then, walking through a small fishing port called Iburi, we got insight as to why. It was around 10 am and a couple of fishing boats had come back into port to unload their catch. The sky above the boats was filled with kites, the most common raptor in Japan. We’d been seeing them everywhere and had spent much time admiring their gliding on updrafts, or watching them circle over water looking for an inattentive fish near the surface. But as we walked a little further on, around the harbor, we suddenly spotted a whole lot of gulls sitting on some rocks outside the harbor sea walls, alongside cormorants (another bird we’d seen everywhere). They seemed unusually cowed and as we started laughing about how the gulls were afraid of the kites, suddenly a large flock of gulls took to the air and headed for the unloading dock. Our eyes flicked over to the directions they were heading and, like the gulls, saw no kites. Now was their chance! But as they crested the sea wall, their hopes were dashed. Suddenly at least a dozen kites rose up from wherever they had been beyond our obstructed view and engaged the gulls in battle. For a few minutes gulls and kites took on the looks of WWI dog fighters, swooping in and out of each other’s formations, until the gulls conceded defeat and headed back to their distant rocks.

Birds have constantly come to our attention. The uguisu (Japanese Bush Warbler) sings the most beautiful song. The crows, found everywhere, do not; but their caws can travel across narrow mountain valleys. Mornings belong to the morning dove’s song. Lately we’ve watched swallows darting over fields and rivers which are otherwise patrolled by elegant egrets and herons.

As we descended from the mountains near Toshashimizu, we saw a tiny harbor island, covered in trees which were, in turn, covered with nesting herons and egrets. Our photographs did no justice to the wonder of seeing the density of their nests.

We hadn’t really thought much about insects until we arrived in Shimanto and discovered that the Shimanto River is famous for its huge population of fireflies in the summer (there is a firefly museum there that we missed, but have placed on our list of places to see when we come back later). We could easily picture the broad grassy banks of the Shimanto River, the last river to remain without a dam in Japan, sparkling with their green lights.

As we descended onto the beach at Okinohama, we spied a huge moth sitting on the face of a drink vending machine. Once we saw it, it was impossible to unsee the face of a samurai on its wing pattern.

A few days later, as we climbed to the Matsuo Pass where we would officially cross from Kochi to Ehime, we sat in a sunny spot to catch our breath and watched these strange, large furry insects flitting around the grass. They looked like bumble bees, with different coloring (reddish brown) and long black noses. Sam thought he’d remembered learning about them and, as someone his age is used to doing, looked them up on Google. Bee flies, they are called, and apparently they prey on bee hives, inserting their eggs into the hive so their hatchlings can feast on bee grubs.

We’ve seen dogs and cats aplenty, especially at the White Lighthouse Hotel in Hiwasa where 20 cats roam the hotel, riding the elevators, wandering into the changing rooms for the baths or just plain plopping down in the lobby waiting for guests to pet them.

Horses and cows as well, although not roaming in large pastures as they would in California. Yesterday, as we were walking along the road, we were treated to the sight of a beautiful goat sitting atop a short, flat-roofed shed. A sign nearby said, “Taro’s House,” with a drawing of a goat…obviously named Taro. There were goats outside of Temple 35 and this afternoon, along the Iwamatsu River, in each case, small family units with kids nudging their mothers’ udders for a feeding.

We’ve been seeing signs occasionally warning us to beware of “mamushi,” the Japanese adder, a poisonous snake. It is actually a bit too early in the year for them to be very active, but with the warming weather we’ll have to take those signs more seriously. We did, in fact, see one snake, dying on the roadside near Temple 39. Not much of a herpetologist here, but I sent a picture to Peter who said it is likely some kind of rat snake. I suspect they eat frogs, of which there are so many now that the rice paddies are being flooded in preparation for this year’s planting. We have spent many hours walking alongside filled paddies and small river banks being serenaded by choruses of frogs. We’ve also been seeing more and more salamanders in the same paddies. This is a good time and place for those interested in reptiles and amphibians.

The path from Temple 23 to Temple 24 brought us to Cape Muroto and an environment defined by the coastline and the specific kind of ocean in the offing. The Muroto area has been designated a “GeoPark” and as we rested at a GeoPark museum north of Temple 24, Sam learned that just a couple hundred meters off the coast was a deep ocean trench, much like the one that cuts across the Monterey Bay. As we reached Cape Ashizuri, at the southwestern edge of Shikoku, we found a sign telling us that this is where the “Kuroshio” (Black Current), a warm current running north from the Philippines first hits Japan. These oceans are rich in pelagic fish and mammals, especially whales, which have played a part in the recent history of Japan in particular (a story for another post).

Of course, fish are the defining animal of the area. We mostly see them as food, in our nightly meals of sashimi and grilled fish, or in our breakfasts of grilled fish. We see them in the crystal clear rivers we walk along, often carp, but also ayu, a favorite river fish for grilling. I was taken back to a favorite memory of a trip I took with my friend Tosh Tanaka back in 2010 when I began to encounter bonito processing plants along the southwestern coast of Kochi. For some the strong fish smell might prove difficult, but bonito are a key ingredient in many soup bases and Sam and I could hardly peek into one of these factories, their doors wide open, without breathing in deeply of the scent of oven roasting bonito, our mouths watering at the hopes for some flash seared bonito for lunch or dinner.

Ocean life has offered a response to the declining human population in a couple of ways, most surprisingly in an educational setting in Muroto where an old elementary school, closed because of insufficient numbers of children, was converted into an interesting aquarium.

Some of the classrooms were kept largely intact, including with the original desks, but tanks lining the sides. On the top floor, the science labs were converted into “dissection experience” rooms with shark carcasses awaiting that day’s visitors.

And we couldn’t help but grin at the sight of the swimming pool now filled with sea turtles, hammerhead sharks, rays and whatnot, instead of kids.

Sam’s favorite part was the hallway with taxidermied specimens whose labels included such phrases as “delicious,” “delicious, but hard to catch,” and “NOT delicious.” Ah, aquariums in Japan! You never fail to delight!

We also encounter representations of animals everywhere. Too many to count. Temples and shrines are adorned with carvings of elephants, “kirin,” “baku,” dragons, rabbits and even mice. Houses have fish, eagles, phoenixes, turtles, cranes, doves and more in silver ceramic, adorning the corners of roofs.

Temple 40 had a frog statue with a marker that played on the homophone between “kaeru” for “frog” and “kaeru” for “return.” Frog statues are an invitation to meditate on the question of returning (who returns, to where do we return, what returns?). In this case, a nearby sign spoke of the “prosperity of frogs/returning”:
“Three generations of families return
Money returns
Good fortune returns
Sickness returns (from whence it came)”

Finally, one of our favorite temples is a “bangai,” a temple that is connected to the pilgrimage, but not one of the numbered 88: Saba Daishi (mackerel Daishi).

The temple tells the story of a time the Daishi was traveling in the area and came across a man with a horse loaded with salted mackerel. Unfortunately, the man spoke abusively to the Daishi, refusing his request for alms. But as he and his horse climbed a nearby hill, the horse was suddenly overcome with pain. The man then realized that he’d abused the holy man. He rushed back and apologized and begged for the Daishi to heal his horse. The Daishi used holy water to heal the horse and then used the water to restore the salted mackerel to life, releasing them back into the sea. These days, when you come to the temple to pray for, say, a healing from illness, you can vow to the statue of the Daishi, who is holding a mackerel in his right hand, that you won’t eat mackerel for three years. If you keep your promise, your wishes will be granted.

I love mackerel. I really love mackerel. This would have to be a serious need for me to keep that promise.

But, I guess, the lesson is that the mackerel is, like these other animals we’ve observed, sentient beings as well.