Well, this one weekend my friend Scott called me at some ungodly hour in the morning on Saturday and invited me to the Fushimi Inari Shrine. This shinto shrine is most well-known for the scene in "Memoirs of a Geisha" that if you saw you will recognize this:
Fushimi Inari is always described as having hundreds of these red shinto gates but it was more like thousands! There were so many including little paths through bamboo forests to weird gravyards such as this one.
In this particular graveyard there was this statue of an old Japanese God. Now I don't know his name or really what he even stands for but I do know this guy must beat up on smaller weak little gods cause just LOOK at him! Sword, rope, fire, angry-looking face to make you whimper in fear.
Awesome shinto god.
This shrine was really not much but orange gates, I am sure there is some fantastic history to the place that Scott, currently taking Japanese art history should have been able to tell me, but alas, I was just there to take pictures.
After Fushimi Inari, Scott and I headed to a temple (a shrine means it is for the Shinto religion, a temple means it is for Buddhism) with a garden famous for it's Rakudan. Rakudan are stone sculptures of people who have achieved enlightenment and followed Buddha's path. I was expecting all happy, smiling little men but one of the first stone figures you see is this guy:
Mr. Grouchy fittingly has bird poop on his head. Is he angry because a
bird pooped on him or did a bird poop on him because he was being grumpy?
There were hundreds of creepy little stone guys in the garden, it was really something from another world. Since women cannot achieve enlightenment according to the buddhist faith (don't get me started), the only female statue in the garden was of Buddha's mother. At first Scott and I couldn't find her but thanks to Scott's art history class, he remembered that Buddha was born from his mother's armpit (no joke) and we promptly recognized her as the statue with one arm raised. Other figures included a cow and his farmer, how the cow became enlightened I don't know.
Enlightened cow...
This dude was just enlightened and chilling before
Scott came up and started mocking him.
Other than the rakudan, the garden was really very pretty but totally not made for hot days, and tall, tired americans.
Wish I could tell everybody more about the history of these two places, but unfortunately that's not quite my forte as some of you know. Extra bonus post dedicated to Claire Little after this!
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