It was time for some templing.
This temple is all Toriis: orange gates big and small!
We made this one, and pretended to hang it for good wishes, but instead brought it home.
The bigger toriis are donated by local businesses, which is less mystical than I'd hoped.
Special messenger foxes like hanging out in the shrines, carrying stuff around and being Shinto.
Our linguistic limitations didn't help us to understand what the sweepy bits are for, or what the big rocks mean.
We hiked most of the way up the torii mountain.
On the way down, there was also a touch of Buddhism. That's ok, Shintoism and Buddhism blend together somehow.
A lot of ropes are involved. I believe they are Shimenawa, which are used to denote holy spaces, and to separate the holy from the profane! So you wanna stay on the correct side.
In Malaysian/Indonesian Islam, as well as in Japan, ceremonial stones/graves get dressed in nice shirts. I do not know why, in either case.
This is the Higashi Hongan-ji temple.
While it's pretty, there is one main feature: Hair!
When the temple ran out of rope to drag goods around, they just made one out of devotees' hair! And then left it on display for a hundred years. Great tourist attraction; hard to photograph well.
Luckily, crowd control was well managed. Barry noted the difference.
