Japan trip report 26 Sep

[jinian]

We traveled to Kyoto! We had a reasonable amount of time in the morning, and did fine getting out of town.

Our plan was to attend the Comb Festival (Kushi Matsuri) at a shrine near Gion, the geisha quarter. Every year this particular shrine has a ceremony honoring combs and laying broken ones to rest; this is not just "your hair is your life" rhetoric but lies partly in a linguistic issue, in that comb (kushi) sounds like suffering (ku) and death (shi), so the custom is that breaking combs or touching other people's, etc., are a big deal. We came to the ceremony part but mostly couldn't see and were starving, so we decided to go get food and return for the parade.

After some dithering, we found a cafe serving sandwiches and such. Wim was very tempted by their coffee, which they seemed to really care about and take pride in brewing well, but he resisted. The sandwiches were ham and fresh omelet and things, and surprisingly tasty and refreshing.

The parade took a while to form up, but we were able to see and photograph lots of amazing period hairstyles and costumes during that time. The styles of where your face paint stopped were different at different times! (See entire post on Kushi Matsuri for photos.)

Then we proceeded to wander around to find statues both giant and cute. Somewhere Wim had gotten a guide to the statues of the area that you could touch and get merit, so we hunted a few down. The first one we found was the biggest -- an enormous concrete Kwannon that was totally beautiful against the backdrop of the wooded hills.



We went into the temple precinct, where they gave us incense, and placed it in the main offering bowl.



There was a lot to look at there, including giant stone footprints of Buddha --



-- and a memorial to unknown soldiers. (I cried there; something about the dirt from military cemeteries around the world in glass jars, on top of the general awfulness of war, really got to me.)



As so often, there appeared to be a shrine within the temple.



We found a few more of the statues: Nene and her guy, whom we touched with our right hands or both hands, as is apparently the right way to do it -- they're lucky for partnerships since they stayed together throughout a very difficult period in Japanese history;



an ox that bears people's health burdens, which I touched on its belly; prayer wheels which I might have spun wrong, since they had labels in kanji. It was too hot and sticky and I was getting a rash, so we started home and found kompeito in the tiny shopping mall dedicated to Nene. Wim made fun of me for knowing about it because of an Arabidopsis pollen mutant. Hmph.

We got back to our lodgings, a lovely tatami room at the Kyoto Tour Club, early and showered before going out for okonomiyaki at a place recommended by the club. It was pretty great. Lots of foreigners come in there, understandably, so the regulars were tolerably amused by us and gave us a hand as we left.