Awa (Temples 1-23)

Ryōzen-ji (Temple 1) to Yakuō-ji (Temple 23) · the first of the four dōjō

Part of the Shikoku 88 Temple Pilgrimage.

Awa is the first of the four dōjō — the four old provinces the Shikoku circuit crosses, one section each. It runs 154.5 km from Ryōzen-ji, Temple 1, where the circuit begins, to Yakuō-ji, Temple 23, where Tosa takes it up from the same point, and 23 of the pilgrimage's 88 temples stand on it. That 154.5 km is this section's own walked line, measured through the 22 henro trail relations it pins in OpenStreetMap; the four dōjō together measure 1,140.9 km against the pilgrimage's traditional ~1,200 km figure.

The five day stages below were cut from that line by a rule rather than copied from a guidebook, so anyone with the files can re-run them and get the same days.

Key Facts

Overview of Awa, Temple 1 to Temple 23.

Distance	154.5 km (this section's own walked line through its 22 pinned relations; their member ways sum to 155.3 km, and the four dōjō together to 1,140.9 km)
Typical duration	6 days (range 4–8)
Topology	Linear
Difficulty	Hard
Countries	Japan
Elevation range	0–760 m (total ascent 3,280 m, descent 3,290 m)
Start	Ryōzen-ji, Temple 1 (15 m)
End	Yakuō-ji, Temple 23

The typical duration is a pace estimate, not a stage count: it divides this section's 154.5 km by the pace the pilgrimage's own declared figures imply, about 26.7 km a day. The day cut below divides the same line 5 ways.

Elevation Profile

Ascent, descent and every high and low point on this page are sampled from the SRTM 30 m digital elevation model at each of the walked line's 7,054 vertices, with a 20 m threshold so the model's own noise is not counted as climbing. This section carried none of it until now: the line is two-dimensional, and the figures come from the model rather than from the geometry. Read them as this line's, not the henro trail's in general — where the pinned relations follow a road, the model reads the road.

The files also hold point heights on temples, where OpenStreetMap tagged one. Eighteen of the 88 temple waypoints carry one — three in Awa, three in Tosa, five in Iyo and seven in Sanuki. Awa's three are Shōzan-ji (Temple 12) at 700 m, Kakurin-ji (Temple 20) at 470 m and Tairyū-ji (Temple 21) at 600 m, and they are what the sampling can be checked against: the model reads 700 m where the line passes Shōzan-ji, exactly the height the map gives it. It reads 486 m near Tairyū-ji, which the map puts at 600 m, because the walked line passes 79 m from that gate and below the climb to it. A height at a gate is still not a profile between gates, and nothing here interpolates one — the profile above is read off the line itself.

Stages

A day ends at a temple whenever one falls between 25 and 30 km along the walked line; where none does, it ends at the nearest named accommodation or town waypoint on the line instead, and a day that comes within 30 km of the section's own end anchor ends there whatever its length. Three of Awa's five days end at a temple and two at a lodging. Every distance is the length of route.main.geojson between that day's own two anchors, and every anchor carries a note in stages.json saying which arm of the rule chose it; the whole rule, its tie-breaks and the readings it refuses are written out in metadata.json's provenance.

Stage 4 runs 52.9 km, the longest day in this section, and it is long because of an absence rather than a distance: OpenStreetMap records no named accommodation and no town on the walked line between Ido-ji and where the day ends, so the fallback had nowhere nearer to stop. The stage carries that as a warning in stages.json. No maximum refuses a day that long, because refusing would leave the stretch with no day-end at all.

The hours are derived, not reported. Each is Naismith's rule read at two paces and rounded to whole hours — five kilometres an hour plus 600 m of ascent at the fast end, 3.5 km/h plus 500 m at the slow — with no roughness factor, because this dataset holds no walking times for the henro trail to fit one against. Read a window as what a day's distance and climbing cost rather than as a day anyone walks in one go: stage 4's 12–17 hours is what 52.9 km and 1,140 m of ascent come to, and is the same absence the warning describes. metadata.json's hoursNote gives the rule and what it was checked against.

Interior Journey

The narrative and reflection prompt for each stage below are editorial writing, grounded only in what the stage contains — its temples, shrines, towns, spacing and distance. All 5 were read against that evidence and cleared by a reviewer who did not write them, then edited for readability; the edited wording is awaiting a second reading. See docs/review/shikoku-88.md for the checks stage by stage, and docs/data-sources.md for what is, and isn't, independently sourced.

Stage 1 Ryōzen-ji (Temple 1) → Kirihata-ji (Temple 10) 28.3 km · Ten temples in twenty-eight kilometres

Ten of Awa's twenty-three temples stand on this one day. Ryōzen-ji opens it, Gokuraku-ji comes just over a kilometre on, and Konsen-ji, Dainichi-ji, Jizō-ji, Anraku-ji, Jūraku-ji, Kumadani-ji and Hōrin-ji follow before Kirihata-ji closes it at 28.3 km. The widest gap between any two of them is 5.3 km. What else the day passes is near at hand — the ruins of the former Bandō POW camp inside the first kilometre, the town of Itano before the fifth. Ten arrivals in one day: whatever this day asks of you, it is not patience between temples.

Ten arrivals in one day, the widest gap between any two of them 5.3 km — how do you meet the tenth as freshly as the first?

Stage 2 Kirihata-ji (Temple 10) → Sudachi-an 24.3 km · From ten temples to two

Yesterday held ten temples; today holds two. Fujii-dera comes 9.7 km on from Kirihata-ji and Shōzan-ji 11.6 km after that — the two widest gaps between temples Awa has offered so far, and both are wider than any gap in yesterday's ten. Three sacred places stand in the gap between them, Chōdo-an, ishidou-gongen and Ryūsui-an, inside three kilometres of one another. No temple falls where a day of this length would end, so this one does not end at a gate: it stops 3.1 km past Shōzan-ji at Sudachi-an, a guesthouse.

The day ends at a guesthouse because no temple fell where the day did — does the walking change when there is nothing at the end of it to arrive at?

Stage 3 Sudachi-an → Ido-ji (Temple 17) 26.9 km · Five temples in the last eight kilometres

The day walks 18.8 km before it reaches a temple. Shōzan-ji is the last gate behind, and the step from it to the day's first is the second widest between two temples in Awa. That first temple is Dainichi-ji, the second of the name here, after the one on the opening day. Then the spacing collapses: Jōraku-ji, Awa Kokubun-ji, Kannon-ji and Ido-ji all fall inside the 8.1 km after it, and Jōraku-ji to Awa Kokubun-ji is the shortest step between two temples anywhere in Awa. Hie Shrine, Hachiman Shrine and Jigen-ji stand in that same run. One day carries both shapes the section has.

18.8 km to the day's first temple, then four more inside the 8.1 km after it — which of the two is the walking you came for?

Stage 4 Ido-ji (Temple 17) → GuestHouse & Cafe Green House 52.9 km · Fifty-three kilometres between beds

Awa's longest day, 52.9 km, and it is long because of an absence rather than a distance: between Ido-ji and this day's end, nothing on the way is mapped as a bed or a town, so the day had nowhere nearer to stop. The stretch itself is the busiest in the section — more places stand on it than on any other day here, twenty-two of them places to eat. Five temples come with it: Onzan-ji 18.1 km in, then Tatsue-ji, Kakurin-ji, Tairyū-ji and Byōdō-ji. Past Byōdō-ji the first mapped bed is 0.6 km on, at the GuestHouse & Cafe Green House, and the day ends there.

A day with everything on it but a bed — is it long because the way is, or because of where the map let it end?

Warning: 52.9 km, the longest of Awa's five days. OpenStreetMap records no named accommodation or town on the walked line between Ido-ji and this day's end, so the rule had nowhere nearer to stop. Carry water and food for the whole distance, or break the day at a place off the line.

Stage 5 GuestHouse & Cafe Green House → Yakuō-ji (Temple 23) 22.1 km · One temple, at the end of it

One temple stands on this day and it is the last thing on it. Byōdō-ji to Yakuō-ji is 22.7 km, the widest step between two temples in Awa, and the day walks all but 0.6 km of it. Nothing is mapped along the first 11.2 km — the longest such stretch in the section. Then three stations come one after another, Yuki, Tainohama and Kiki, and at the very end the day gathers what the rest of it withheld: Hiwasa Hachiman Shrine, the town of Minami, a clinic, a restaurant and two places to stay. Yakuō-ji closes Awa, and Tosa begins from the same point.

Twenty-two kilometres to one gate, and the section ends at it — what do you want to be carrying when you get there?

Waypoints

195 waypoints stand on this section, each with a type, a stageIndex and a kmFromStart measured along this section's own walked line — of which 43 are sacred sites and 2 are towns.

Waypoint counts by type on Awa (Temples 1-23).

Type	Count
Sacred sites	43
Cultural sites	2
Towns	2
Accommodation	9
Food (restaurant/café)	29
Transport (bus/train)	25
Supply (convenience/toilet)	70
Medical (pharmacy/hospital)	14
Water sources	1
Total	195

The 23 temples are the curated half: hand-placed, carrying a templeNumber and no osmId, and they are what the day rule looks for. The other 172 came from OpenStreetMap through the enricher, every one of them carrying an osmId, so a re-run reproduces them.

index.json records this section as sparse: false, at 5 places per stage. That bar belongs to a section, not to a day: a section clears it when at least half its stages carry a place beyond their own start and end, and all five of Awa's do. The 5 is the mean of those beyond-the-ends counts — 11, 2, 6, 5 and 1 — so it is not the number of places you would pass in a day.

Seven waypoints in this file never reach a stage. The corridor that admitted them is measured against route.geojson, which carries every member way of the 22 relations and runs 349.7 km against the walked line's 154.5; build-ways then measures against the walked line and drops anything more than 300 m from it. All seven are named, with their distances, in ways/report.json.

Help fill in what is missing.

Geometry

The walked line is cut from 22 OpenStreetMap relations, one per temple-to-temple leg from Temple 1 to Temple 23, in walking order. The Overpass query is pilgrimage-wide and returns all 89 四国遍路 relations; each section pins the slice of that result it walks, and a boundary relation belongs to the section that walks it — so 22番札所~23番札所 is here, and Awa ends at Temple 23 where Tosa begins.

One relation is excluded on purpose rather than missing. 13669296, 四国遍路 16番札所観音寺~18番札所恩山寺, is an alternative that skips Temple 17: it passes no closer than 1,295 m to Ido-ji, against 48 m to Temple 16 and 8 m to Temple 18. The circuit's own path, 16→17 then 17→18, runs 21.00 km against the alternative's 19.08, so the shortcut saves 1.92 km by leaving a temple out. The pilgrimage visits all 88 in order.

route.geojson holds all of those relations' member ways, 7,660 points and 349.7 km of them, including the spurs and side paths a walker does not follow. route.main.geojson is the shortest connected path through the same graph — 7,054 points, 154.5 km — and it is the line every stage, every stage distance and every waypoint position on this page is measured along.

Tradition

Primary faith: Shingon Buddhism

The circuit traces the path of the monk Kūkai (774–835), Kōbō Daishi, who founded Shingon Buddhism in Japan and practised asceticism across Shikoku before founding the monastic centre on Mount Kōya. The 88-temple circuit was formalised during the Edo period.

The pilgrimage maps a stage of spiritual progression onto each of Shikoku's four provinces, and the one this section's metadata.json records for Awa is awakening.

Credential: the nōkyōchō (納経帳), a calligraphy book bought at Temple 1 and carried across all four dōjō. At each temple the monks write the temple name, its principal deity and its number, and apply three red stamps. A completed book earns the kechigan-shō, the completion certificate — which is awarded for the circuit, not for any one section of it.

Files & CDN

The complete dataset lives at routes/shikoku-88-awa/:

Per-route data files for Awa (Temples 1-23).

File	Contents
metadata.json	Overview, tradition, logistics, and provenance — including the full day rule
route.geojson	Every member way of the pinned relations — 7,660 points
route.main.geojson	The walked line the stages are cut from — 7,054 points
route.gpx	GPX 1.1 track for GPS apps and devices — 7,660 points
stages.json	5 day stages, with interior journey narratives
waypoints.geojson	195 waypoints — 23 curated temples, 172 from OpenStreetMap
ways/route.json	The stage package's catalog card; ways/report.json beside it records what this section can and cannot promise a walker

Available via jsDelivr CDN:

https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/shikoku-88-awa/metadata.json
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/shikoku-88-awa/route.geojson
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/shikoku-88-awa/route.gpx
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/shikoku-88-awa/stages.json
https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/gh/walktalkmeditate/open-pilgrimages@v1/routes/shikoku-88-awa/waypoints.geojson

Route ID: shikoku-88-awa