After spending years working for the shakuhachi community, founding the European Shakuhachi Society, founding the traveling European Shakuhachi Summer School – which travels to a new location each year (except on the years a World Shakuhachi Festival is taking place in order to encourage people to join the WSF instead) and organising World Shakuhachi Festival 2018 (with a great team consisting of Jim Franklin, Thorsten Knaub, Michael Soumei Coxall and Nigel Puttergill and many more) – I needed a break! A real break with a spiritual overtone. My partner Kenneth and I decided to walk the pilgrimage Shikoku88 staring February 2019.
Shikoku88 is a pilgrimage that is 1200 km long and has 88 official temples on the route. Thus you are walking from temple to temple. It is associated Kūkai or Kōbō Daishi, the munk who brought esoteric Buddhism to Japan.