Who Are The Pilgrims?

Will the real Buddhist pilgrims please stand up?

The breakdown of the pilgrims I met basically goes down along these lines-

75% Japanese retirees on a tour bus trip organized by their neighborhood Buddhist temple
15% Japanese retirees walking most of the route but breaking it up with train and bus rides
5% Younger Japanese people (younger than 50) who seem to be doing the pilgrimage for a variety of deep spiritual or personal reasons
4.99% Random foreigners doing it for the adventure
0.01% Weirdo jazz pianists with a platoons worth of awesome friends and family

So its mostly older people, which will explain why most of my pictures are with a bunch of random Japanese obaa-sans and ojii-sans (grandmas and grandpas). Why is this exactly?

I believe the reason is that it is both logistically impossible and socially unacceptable for most mainstream Japanese people in their prime working years to take multiple months off of work to go on some random spirit journey. You tell your employer that you need 7 weeks off to find yourself in the wilderness, he instantly not only fires you, but also blacklists your name throughout the white collar world as someone who is wishy washy and unreliable. The work culture here is still as brutal as ever. 10 hour plus days are the norm, and even schoolkids put in a half day on Saturday, so everyone's weekend is basically just Sunday, if that. Even though things are changing, such as allowing women to have more meaningful careers in the office and giving more consideration to family time, things change slowly over here. The only possible time in the life of a working Japanese person to do something as crazy as the Shikoku pilgrimage seems to be when they aren't working anymore. Any young person who would set out on this thing must be daft, irresponsible, or insane.

Which is why I love pilgrimage people, both young and old.