The Buddhist pilgrimage, a type of holy hiking, is an ancient tradition in Japan that requires visiting temples, bushwhacking through brush and swatting mosquitoes. There are two kinds of pilgrimages: big and small. The big ones like the Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage take five to six weeks to walk (six if you leave a week for all the time you'll spend lost, and five if you have a homing beacon). It's no wonder older people used to set out on pilgrimage with the intention of dying along the way. Grandma would just disappear into the wilderness.

There are hundreds of pilgrimages around Japan, and even Shiraishi Island has one called the Shikoku Michi (named after the big one in Shikoku) that the islanders have been holy hiking for over 200 years. Since I have already hiked the Shikoku pilgrimage, I thought doing our island pilgrimage would be easy, especially because it is said that all 88 of the holy sites (marked by small Buddhist statues) can be visited in one day. But I have only made it halfway through the pilgrimage so far in one week. Let me explain.

Although pilgrims used to wear a robe and carry only a begging bowl, nowadays what you should bring on the smaller pilgrimages is a map, drinking water and a chain saw. Fallen trees, territorial spiders and disappearing paths are the plagues of the smaller pilgrimages. Although my neighborhood dutifully cleans the part of the pilgrimage path that runs through the mountain on our part of the island, some neighborhoods are apparently shirking their cleaning duties. This is probably because some neighborhoods have actually disappeared along with the island population over the past 30 years. Perhaps these people took their part of the pilgrimage with them when they went.