In the mountains above Takamatsu, Roshi Daito Noda continues on as he has been for the last several decades. In brief, he is extending the temple, drawing upon the historical involvement of Buddhist institutions in communal life with a spirit of humble innovation. A pilgrimage lodging, a dojo, a special education school, several green houses, a restaurant, an administrative building, a bathhouse and an industrial kitchen make up the property. Kappa Dojo is also the 81st of 88 sites on the Shikoku pilgrimage, a circular route around the smallest of Japan’s major islands, but it is a unique place, perhaps less interesting to the spiritual pilgrim than to the layperson. 

I visited Kappa Dojo for just a few days in late February, mostly working to package picked herbs and plant new seeds. After breakfast, we gathered in a small room behind the organic cafe, with both the heater and the radio on full blast. American classic rock, Japanese folk music, and the news made up the morning show. The rules for sorting bushels of mint, rosemary and peppers were detailed on laminated sheets of paper with metrics for which leaves were too big and which chiles not red enough. Every couple of hours, we would take a break and have barley tea and small oranges, not exactly defective but ugly. Unsurprisingly, their peels went into a compost bin and dried out in the inconsistent sun. After lunch, we worked in the greenhouse, where long rows of something were sprouting. The staff was made up of volunteers, mostly retired, from the area and headed by the only other monk at the monastery and general manager. This combination of enterprise, non-profit work, environmental stewardship and community engagement was a marvel to see.

In recent years, concerns about the endurance of Buddhism in Japan have motivated many temples to try out innovative gestures toward relevance, cultural or spiritual. There have been many cases of programs targeted at youth: cooking classes, sake tastings, calligraphy lessons but also spiritual advising and formal humanitarian outreach. When, in the 1970s, Roshi Noda established the dojo and some of its initial programming, much of the academic study of Buddhism remained rooted in the texts (sutras, poems, secondary scholarships, etc.). Questions of the present and future role of Japanese religious institutions were certainly being articulated, as Roshi Noda’s work shows us, but it would be several years before the sociocultural anthropological approach of John Nelson, Ian Reader and others would come into use. Meanwhile, the Roshi established in 1978 the training dojo (zazen-do) and began preaching. He became registered as a foster parent in 1983 and to this day houses two dependents. Noda likewise innovated in practical tasks, reclaiming a drinking pond to build a well, which would then be pumped by dormitory students for domestic use. A small publishing department, a culture class, a lecture series, a bread making workshop, survival skills training, and, finally, a federally recognized Social Welfare Corporation are established. For his willingness and keen ability to recognize and respond to needs, local, cultural and national, Noda himself comes to be recognized. 

On my final day in Kagawa, five visitors traveled from Osaka to the dojo. The night before, Noda Roshi lent me two books of a series written by one of the visitors, and illustrated by another. These were elaborate guides to nature–how to build from it, live in it, avoid its dangers and honor it most fully, that is, by making full use of it. Each description was accompanied by a wonderful visualization with numbered steps. One illustration of how to build a stone wall without any grout stands out in memory. There were also several photos of the real life projects which this environmentalist clan had taken on. Beyond the context given by the rushed translations I made of the introductions to both books, I would come to learn almost nothing more about the visitors in my afternoon with them. My Japanese is still crude, but this was before the spring semester had begun, and I understood very little of their conversation. I can tell you that three men and two women, all between fifty and seventy years old, came in one car. The tallest of the group was a man wearing jika-tabi (sock-shoes with split toes), and everyone wore rain gear. 

In a light drizzle, we received a grand tour from the roshi, not only of the immediate dojo property, but also of two neighboring sites. One is the Goshikidai Children’s Hospitality Place, an octagonal wooden structure offering free accommodation for four pilgrims. Nearby, there is a toilet and a washroom and just outside, on a picnic table, a tap of hot tea. The second location, up the hill, is a towering mansion of white stucco. With limited ability to grasp the kind of explanation of what we were all doing here, I looked around. Behind the house, off to one side of the dirt driveway, compost is piled up, ready to be burned. The tall man in tabi  walks across it, feeling for something with his soles, then bouncing up and down. Looking up, I counted five stories and several windows across, maybe eight. The inside revealed a defunct dormitory, decorated in the 80s but now sagging and torn. Some rooms still held all their furnishings, while others were boarded up or empty. Still further up, a narrow concrete staircase leads to the roof, which is flat and walkable all the way across. Over the low railing, the inland sea and many of nearby islands come into spectacular view. The group took photos on digital cameras, whether for research or a personal file I have no clue. 

After the tour, we gathered in the restaurant, closed since the onset of the pandemic. Earlier that day, the roshi and I had set the table and laid out wagashi (sweets) at each setting. For the tea, we cut mint and rosemary from bushes off the restaurant patio and prepared them in a glass pot. For the party favors, I weighed and bagged a pound each of iyo stone, once used for sharpening samurai swords. They had come from the construction site where an expanded school facility will be completed next year. For all this activity, it may have been that the group was interested in Noda Roshi as a like-minded spirit, boundary-pushing and grounded. Once seated, the conversation related mostly to the Shikoku land, medicine, food and digestion. I listened as best I could and was only required to speak once. “How old are you,” asked the shorter man, but I did not understand him and said so. He repeated himself, and still I did not understand (mada wakaranakute, sumimasen). Finally, on a different tack, the man said, “I am fifty-three. And you?” From this, I managed a response. 

By this point, I had spent the last few days frustrated by a language barrier further amplified by the Shikoku regional accent. In a Facebook post summarizing my visit, the roshi joked about the trouble. Roughly translated, the post reads:

“Speak Japanese”

Perhaps because of the lull in Corona, we are seeing an increasing number of pilgrims and Zen practitioners in other countries. Lucy, from America, who came for 3 days, was studying abroad at university and was interested in Zen, so she studied zazen in Tokyo. She spoke good Japanese, as she had studied Japanese at university. When I spoke to her in Japanese, she said, “Please continue to speak in Japanese.” Of course, I tried to speak to her in Japanese, but she could not understand me. She is in the process of studying formal intonation of Japanese at university, so I was impatient when I realized that the dialect was not Japanese…By the time she comes next, it seems I’ll have to learn the standard language. 

Many of the comments that followed responded to the last line of the roshi’s post. “Foreigners interested in learning Japanese should learn other accents. You do not need to learn Tokyo language,” reads one. Another says, “There is no standard language!” The same might be said of Buddhism in Japan. This much is clear from the slice of the institution of Zen alone that I have witnessed. Still, it is easy enough to distinguish what Noda Roshi has accomplished as remarkable–remarkably insightful and exciting. I say all this based almost exclusively on my observations, rather than on any conversation. Though prolific, Noda roshi, and Kappa Dojo, have a lot to do.