In Shikoku, there’re more places than the 88 sacred temples where Kobo-Daishi have some relationship in its foundation. People in Shikoku also worship among those 20 temples as extra sacred temples.

The sum of the number 88 and 20 is 108. which is said to be the number of human early desires, “bonnou”. So some pilgrims also visit all 20 extra sacred temple to erase their “bonnou” one by one.

Interestingly, at Saba-Daishi Yasaka-ji (Saba means mackerel in Japanese), if you promise to this temple not to eat mackerel for 3 years, then you’ll get the benefit such as curing from diseases, having a baby, fulfilling desires.

Hmm, I cannot do so… I like mackerel so much sorry 🙂

At the Nokyo-jyo, a tough-looking person appeared. I handed my stamp book to him, and told him “It’s quiet and nice to be here”. He laughed and said “Oh, I’m just killing my time”, while starting to write the script very smoothly… wow how beautiful the way he write. He then asked me where I walked from yesterday, so I replied that I came from No.22 Byodo-ji. He seemed to be bit surprised, since it is more than 45Km away from here, then he offered me a mandarin orange and said to me “Take care, it will become bad weather today”.

Saba-Daishi Yasaka-ji offers Shukubo (lodging for pilgrims), and my original plan was to stay here, but there’re too few pilgrims in this season, so it was closed unfortunately.