Holy Lands

After dance class on Tuesday I went home with one of my friends, since she and her host mother had invited me to come with them to Nara and Ise. Many of the other AKP people had taken advantage of the break to go out of town to Tokyo and the like, but as I had made no such plans it was nice to be able to get out of Kyoto, if only for a few days. Starting early (for me) Wednesday morning my friend, her host mother, and myself boarded the express train for Ise, which took about 2 and a half hours with only one change of trains. Ise is the site of the most important shrine in the Shinto religion, a religion indigenous to Japan and so highly tied into its culture that even people who profess to different faiths often observe Shinto holidays and the like. The reason that the shrines at Ise are so important is that they are the earthly homes of the highest Goddess, Amaterasu-Okami, and one of her main vassal-Gods, Toyouke-Okami. Amaterasu is the sun goddess of the shinto religion, and the mythological progenitor of the Imperial line, which means that besides having a massive temple complex dedicated to her, she also receives gifts from the Imperial household, as well as daily meals, and a new house every 20years. The first place that we went, though, was not the main shrine but the outer one dedicated to Toyouke, the god of food and clothing, responsible for feeding the Goddess, which is much smaller but similar in architecture. From there we went to the ‘Inner Shrine’ to Amaterasu, which was much larger and more crowded. The most striking thing, for me, about both of these temple sites is how little there was in the way of ornamentation. In most every other shrine that I have visited, the buildings have been covered in decorations, surrounded by statues and closed in by brilliant red torii arches, but here there was not only a dearth of carving and statuary, but also no paint: every building and arch was the natural colour of the wood that formed it. According to my brochure, this style of building is believed to be the oldest and purest form of Shinto architecture. The houses of the gods themselves were also very different from what I was used to, in that they were square-ish thatched cottage-looking things, with crossbeams from the ceiling protruding from the roof on both sides to form wide ‘V’s that were then capped in gold. All around the houses themselves were black river stones, with a wide, carefully delineated path of bright-white ones leading up to the ‘front door’. No pictures are allowed to be taken of these buildings, a rule that I have encountered at no other shrine, and only the Emperor is allowed to enter the gates of the main sanctuary. Though the buildings were few and simple, the area surrounding both Toyouke-Okami and Amaterasu-Okami’s shrine were extremely serene and beautiful, simply by virtue of the fact that they were left as natural forests bordered by extremely clear rivers. Besides these two shrines, we also went to another, smaller, one at Iseshima, where there are two rocks in the ocean itself tied together with rope. Both my friend and I had seen pictures of this before, and really wanted to see it as the scale of it all seemed massive. When we got there, however, it appeared that photographs of the location skew the proportions a bit, as it was not nearly so big, and, because of our expectations, a little ridiculously small. In actuality the rope is no bigger than any other rope and the rocks are only a stone’s throw offshore. It was, however, rather amusing that the shrine’s onshore site’s main ornamentation was given over to statues of frogs, which is a play on words, as the word for frog (kaeru) is the same as ‘to come’, suggesting money, good luck, or whatever one wants coming in. After all of this it was time for the all-important Omiyage shopping trip. For a very long time, the most popular gift from Ise was a dessert made by a company called ‘Akafuku’. Unfortunately, there was a scandal involving Akafuku shortly after I arrived in Kyoto, which meant that every single stand, store, or outlet of the Akafuku company was closed, doubtless causing massive losses in revenue. Surely when you hear this you are thinking that they must have inadvertently killed someone, but that’s actually not the case. What they did was freeze some unsold merchandise, thaw it out, and sell it as a fresh product. No one died. No one even got sick, and the dessert wasn’t the sort of thing that could be dangerous if not fresh (such as meat or dairy), but because they lied about the freshness of their product they are in serious trouble. They take freshness here very seriously, apparently. In the end I decided on some lovely pickled radishes (we eat pickles with just about every meal at my host family’s house) and some candy that apparently has nostalgic value and is also only available in Ise. After a very successful trip we headed back to my friend’s house.
-The word for shrine in Japanese is ‘Jinja’, often used as a suffix to the name of the god that lives there (seimei-jinja, for example, enshrines someone named Abe no Seimei). Very big shrines are called Jingu, also used as a suffix to the name (Heian-Jingu, for instance, enshrines a Heian emperor). Amaterasu-Okami’s shrine is so important that it is just called ‘Jingu’. It doesn’t need any other name, it is THE Jingu.
-Ise is also famous for being the site of the Mikimoto, the famous Japanese pearl company.
-If you go to Jingu, there are very detailed English-language brochures available for free from the large stands where they sell the shrine’s charms, you just need to ask or look really foreign.