A stone-carved tanka by Saito Mokichi — one of modern Japan's most celebrated short-poem masters — stands quietly along the Lake Tega promenade in Abiko, Chiba. The poem describes spring clouds drifting over distant marsh grass where geese have settled, a scene that mirrors the very landscape around the stone. This monument sits within Abiko's Literary Garden, a stretch of lakeside walkway that gathers together the memories of the town's remarkable early-twentieth-century literary circle. It's a modest stop, but one that rewards walkers who pause to read the inscription and look out over the water that inspired it.

41st Station of the Shin-Shikoku Sōma Pilgrimage Route

Place of worship

Abiko · JP

41st Station of the Shin-Shikoku Sōma Pilgrimage Route

On the flat rice-field lanes of Fusashita Shinden in Abiko, Chiba, a small neighbourhood Inari shrine keeps its place as No. 41 on the Shin-Shikoku Sōma Pilgrimage — an 18th-century copy of Shikoku's famous 88-temple circuit, laid out along the Tone River instead of the Yoshino River. Tucked behind the shrine is the station's Daishi hall, where flowers and offerings are still kept fresh, and a stone marker gives the number that tells passing pilgrims where they have reached. The choice is quietly clever: the site it stands in for is Ryūkō-ji, a temple on Mount Inari in the original Shikoku sequence, so a fox-shrine on a Chiba plain becomes an exact match for an Inari-mountain temple far to the west. That pun-like correspondence is part of the charm of these miniature pilgrimages, which let people earn the merit of an 88-site circuit without leaving the Edo heartland. This is not a tourist site with a ticket booth or a gift shop. It is a working piece of local faith, best enjoyed as one stop on a bike or on foot among the Tone River embankments, Lake Tega and a handful of old temple halls in the Fusa district of Abiko.