Saturday August 10
I met my first pilgrim last night as I was trying to throw out my garbage. In Japan, one must
take the garbage to the local supermarket, or so I had been told. (I later found out my trash dump was just around the corner from my house.)
"Sumimasen....garbage doko ni?"
I said bludgeoning Japanese grammar like a child smashing a toy truck.
I pointed at my sack of trash. "I'm not from around here. Sorry," came the reply from a
kid dressed in tatters. His shirt was ripped, shorts were caked in dirt and he was wearing
a conical rice pickers' hat. It was only when he turned around that I realized he was
backpacking. But wait a minute. Was that English I just heard? "Where are you from then?" I jumped back excitedly, hoping that his first
well-enuciated line was not a fluke.
"Tokyo...I am ohenlo." What in the hell is ohenlo?, I thought to myself.
And so I asked him.
At around the age of 14, Ashino Taku (pronounced Taak) traded suburbs, moving from Kamakura
outside Tokyo to Ulster outside Boston. He has been travelling ever since, living as a wanderer
with no particular destination. He has walked from Tokyo to Hokkaido, a journey no less than 600 kilometers.
He bounced around Japan's northern island for almost a year, working on a rice farm and growing
to hate the man he worked for. He loved the rest of the people of Hokkaido, but left with a
sour taste because of just one man. He moved on to Germany because his mother asked him to,
a fact that made me reconsider my first impressions of Taku.
Obeisance hardly seemed possible for someone like Taku, standing in front of me as a vagabond,
roaming the countryside, seemingly homeless, aimless, purposeless.
His travels did not cease when he met his mother in Germany to help her with a calligraphy project.
He spent six months in Europe, learning Spanish, Italian, and German. Before long he could easily
communicate in all three, not to mention the English he had picked up in New England. By the age
of 18 Taku was in the South Pacific, learning Indonesian from a friend from Japan. He
was a world traveller before most people even leave home. Yet he was not satisfied.
Returning from Indonesia, Taku began studying at a St. Paul's University in Tokyo,
but despite St. Paul's gift of eduation, he only stayed two years.
Though run by Catholic priests, St. Paul's introduced Taku to Zen, one of the three major schools
of Buddhism. Taku had grown up in Kamakura, just minutes by bicycle from Engaku-ji,
one of the most famous Buddhist temples in all of Japan, but he was not turned on to Zen until
he enrolled at St. Paul's. He began studying voraciously, spending countless hours in the library,
temples and his professors' offices. He even debated a religiously fundamentalist professor
publicly, demanding that the professor either defend his position or step down. Taku said that
the professor was fired soon after the debate.
Buddhist monks nowadays have "squeezed souls," Taku said to me, alluding to the fact that
they have no spirituality. He sees the 'jushok' (fabled Buddhist monks of the hills) as fake;
they do their 2 years of training in Zen and then stop, only practicing Zen as a means to
becoming a revered monk.
My eyes wandered to his ravaged feet, then one toenail, which was bloody and looked like a goner.
I wondered, was he walking around Shikoku on his toes like a ballerina?
"Kukai's journey was exaggerated, though," I awoke from my reverie to hear. "I do not think he
really did this entire journey." Could it be that a disciple of the great Buddhist monk, the
father of the Shingon school of Buddhism, was questioning the validity of the ancient myth
that says Kukai visited all 88 temples. "No," he replied calmly, "its just that over the years,
many people have embellished his story. I think Kukai walked some of this route, but not all."
If so, why would Taku still want to visit all 88? There was no reason to cut it short, he said.
"For me walking is nothing. It is a spiritual experience so I don't think about distance or time.
"In the same way one might gain enlightenment from meditation or prayer, Taku found peace
in steps.
"You can reach spirituality in many ways," Taku said to me.
"I once met a man in Minamata, who saw me with my backpack, invited me to fish, and told me how
he had reached sprituality." And Taku told me about Watananbe, a man whose family had died
from the negligence of a local factory. The factory had dumped waste into the sea, contaminating the
local food supply: fish. He lost his father to mercury poisoning at age five, and many
other family members after that. Watananbe fought the company and the government for years,
filing lawsuits for restitution, all to no avail. The company fought back to suppress
publicity on the story, and the government was reluctant to enter the fray.
When it seemed that the whole world was against him, Watanabe began to go crazy like a Luddite, smashing his
television and destroying his car, disavowing anything associated with modernity.
Watananbe fought and fought, but by the end of his life realized he was "only fighting himself."
At the age of 62, Taku said, Watanabe found that he too had been poisoned by the high levels of mercury
in the sea water, and he was forced to seek medical care. "Violence was not successful," Taku said,
and through it all, the stress had driven Watanbe to near-insanity. He refused the hospital
meals, saying, "I cannot eat even one piece of rice, for to continue my life means I must end
anothers." He refused nutrition for five days, until finally the doctors sedated him and
attached him to an IV.
Watananbe finally reached his spirituality in the infirmary, but it was a long and arduous
process. He had found it only through struggle and pain. But he had found it, and Taku seemed
convinced that he would find his too. "I knew everything just by looking at his face," Taku said
of Watananbe. It was what Taku called "En," an enlightened encounter, both meeting parties
experiencing a sort of extra sensory perception. "Why don't you come fishing with me?"
were Watananbe's first words to Taku, and it was then that Taku realized the importance of the encounter.
And by this point I had realized the importance of my encounter with Taku. He had walked into
my life while walking to realize his own. I was merely taking out the trash.
We talked more about the history of Buddhism and his opinions on the state of it in Japan.
It seemed to me that I ought to listen to his every word. Do not waste this opportunity to hear
such a wise man speak, I thought. He talked about what he called "the Crisis of Buddhism,"
a referral to the incursion of Christianity in Japan. The Buddhist monks at the time had an
important decision to make. Should they embrace elements of Christianity or deny it as
blasphemy? They chose the latter, but attempted to coerce Buddhism on those wayward souls
who seemed bent on conversion. "That was not the right choice, however. You cannot force
people to follow a religion. If the monks only had charisma, then people would have followed
anyway, but they lacked charisma and so they tried to replace it with strict rules."
We finished dinner. I looked at Taku as he talked of charisma. Here was a man,
travelling in tatters, who was afraid of nothing, but curious for everything. His energy was
unparalled. He had walked for 10 hours that day, and had probably traversed 25 kilometers,
but he was exuberant with life to tell his story. And more than anything, Taku seemed wise well
beyond his years. I had to pinch myself to remember that he was but 21 years old.
What I had first took to be a youthful escapade was in fact a mature and loyal quest for
spirituality. The longer I conversed with Taku, the more I realized his purpose was very meaningful,
but perhaps that meaning was unknown to the both of us. In Taku's words, "I don't know why I am
walking. If I knew why I was walking, I would not be walking."
Upon those words my mind drifted back to the James Taylor song, "Walking Man." If Taylor was not
thinking about Taku when he wrote that song, he was certainly thinking of someone like him.
Taku slept on my tatami that night. He declined my offers for a futon or blankets. He said he
was used to sleeping with a jacket for a pillow. When we woke in the morning it was still raining
outside; it had been all night. I imagined that many of his future nights would be in rain-soaked
train stations.
As he thanked me for my osetai, (the generosity many Shikoku residents offer to Ohenlo
walking the temple route: usually small money gifts or food), he stepped out of my apartment
to begin yet another day, walking until sundown. Some days he would walk in the dark, he said,
but only if the weather was good. He said wouldn't make it to the next temple until maybe next week,
though when he does, he will be able to see three or four that same day. He carries no map
to show him the way; he says it makes good conversation to ask for directions. Emaciated and tan,
cut-up and bruised, I have no doubt that Taku will see all 88. The question is not if, but when.
Postscript: Taku called me about a month after staying in Mima to tell me that his wallet had been
stolen in Takamatsu, Shikoku`s eastern most city. He had to return to Tokyo to
make more money, but said he would continue his trip next summer.
