日本の神社

Japanese Shrines

Since it is raining today, I'll post on something I did last week on Thursday.

I went to go visit a Shinto Shrine near the university. This shrine is small and modest, but it is still bursting with history and importance.

Before you can cross into the gates, you need to purify yourself:

You do this by taking a scoop of water and washing off both of your hands; then you take a sip of the water and swish it in your mouth. Then you spit it out--but not back into the water basin! Make sure you spit it out outside of it.

After that, you can cross the gate into the shrine.

At many shrines are these two statues of dog/lions (nobody is sure, and they are often cited as being one or the other). The one on the left is male and the one on the right is female. Those four, white barrels are filled with sake. People often donate them to the shrine. This particular shrine is for a god (kami) that would protect warriors in battle. So, while you can ask for anything, protection and good health wishes may be especially useful here.

So, before you pray, you throw in some yen into the alter (usually 5 or 10, which is about a dime or nickle). Japan places a little mystical significance on money, and it's not strage at all that giving money is part of the religious ritual. Then you announce your presence to the gods by making some noise, usually in the form of ringing a bell.

It's not a high pitched tone that one usually thinks of when they think of bells, but more of a clunky metal on metal sound. After that you bow twice, clap your hands twice, pray, and bow again. The clapping of the hands, if there is no bell, also serves to announce your presence. That's the basic ritual of individual worship. There are also a few other things that are common place at most shinto shrines. One of which is getting a fortune (usually determined by drawing a number) or leaving wishes on paper or blocks of wood. One then ties these to a fence to encourge the luck or wish to come true.

This particular shrine also has some other unique features. One is a memorial to a Kamakaze piolt from the area. They recovered his plane propeller and honor him here.

Here people pray for him; I think that the dead can actually become kami, but I am not entirely sure.

Also, this place was visited by the single most important kami in Shinto. If you go behind the shrine to the pilot, and climb up a forested hill:

You will find a circle of rocks

that markes where the goddess of the sun, Amaterasu-omikami, visited the area. Her great grandson is actually the first emperor of Japan, Emperor Jimmu. People debate whether or not Jimmu actually existed, but it is not unlikely that he actually lived. However, since people hated climbing the hill to see this holy site, they built the Hirota shrine in Nishinomiya (one of the 22 most holy sites in Shinto). This shrine is much larger and grander than this one!

And that is all there is really to see here! Thanks for coming!

Oh, and what ancient religion is without its fertility statues?