temples, more temples and sore feet

Rupa and I headed to the "countryside" today for some temple viewing. We hopped in a train this morning to Katakura, which is about an hour from Tokyo station in Tokyo. Katakura was spared for bombing during WWII because of all of the beautful temples and its historical significance. The temples are sprinkled all through the town which sits on a small bay.

From the Katakura JR station, we then took the local train to Hase station and followed a crowd of uniformed school children to the Daibatsu (great Buddha). The Daibatsu is an enormous, hollow bronze statue of Buddha. It was originally inside a temple but the temple was washed away during a tsunami in the fifteenth century.

Rupa is small but not *that* small.

We went inside the Buddha and gazed up into the hollow of his head.

And wandered around the gardens.

We then visited the Hase-Kannon temple. This large temple complex was build on a hill so we wandered up and down stone stairs and through little gardens visiting temple after temple.


Surrounding the shrine to Jizo (the patron saint of travellers and the souls of departed children) are hundreds of little statues of Jizo.

Women who have had miscarriages and abortions come here and dress the statues to keep them warm.


Further up the hill is the temple to Kannon, the Bodhisattva of infinite compassion.

Click here to see some of the thirty-some-odd reincarnations of Kannon.

Next to the temple is a prayer wheel (movie). If you spin the wheel, the knowledge of the scrolls in it will be given to you. Surrounding the wheel house was a moat of small rocks with characters on them. I wish I had stuck with Chinese so I could've figured out what some of these were.



Also on the grounds was a cave with a very low ceiling. At the end of the cave was this.




Then we hopped on the train and went to Kitakamakura. We noticed that the train was full of women; there were hardly any men. Many of the women were older, some with canes, some with their daughters.

We walked up the main road at Kitakamajura, dodging uniformed school kids getting out of school. We wanted to go to the Ennoji Temple but it was late and it had already closed.

So we headed to the Kenchoji temple.

We made our way through a series of buildings, stopping to look at each one that was open,


until we reached what felt like the end of the complex.

There was a trail that went up into the hill, at this point, at at the top of the hill is a shrine.

The school next door uses the temple grounds for athletic training. As we hiked up to a temple, we were constantly passed and were dodging an army of running boys in baseball uniforms. (Every single kid had slide stains on his pants) They were made to run to the bottom of the stairs that go up the hill to the temple, but not up the stairs. The basketball team, which was a little bit older, had to run up the stairs.


At the top of the stairs was a shrine. As we approached it, we passed winged bird-men (I can't remember what these are called) and could hear drums and chanting.

Click here to download a movie of the monk's chanting. I should warn you: its about 13 MB. But its worth it.


A few more stairs to the very top of the hill where we met a retired japanese gentleman who kindly lead us down the other side and back to the JR train station.