Author of the Hiro Hattori (Shinobi) mysteries
Every February, Ushi-Tenjin Kitano Jinja (shrine) holds a koubai (red plum blossom) festival to celebrate the blooming ume (Japanese plum) trees that grow around the shrine. Last weekend, a friend and I hopped a train to Bunkyo to check out the festival, and the early blooms.
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The Nyonin-michi–literally, “women’s trail”–circumambulates the rim of Kōyasan’s mountaintop plateau. Before the Meiji Era, this was as close to the sacred holy sites as women were allowed to come.
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Fushimi Inari Taisha winds up the slopes of Mt. Inari like a coiled dragon made of vermilion gates; while many visitors go no farther than the first station, Mom, Laurie, Kaitlyn, and I made the hour-long trek to the summit, as a “training climb” that would let me assess our potential pace for the upcoming (and far longer) climb of Fuji.
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Akagi Jinja (shrine) sits on the shore of Lake Onuma, not far from the trailhead that leads to the peaks of nearby Mt. Akagi. (The mountain, a stratovolcano, has numerous summits – three of which I summited last weekend as part of my hyakumeizan climb.) The shrine dates to at least the 14th century, and has subsidiary shrines across Japan.
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Kyoto’s Eikan-do Zenrin-ji is the head temple of the Seizan branch of Pure Land Buddhism in Japan. The temple sits near the southern end of the famous Philosopher’s Path, and although it’s famous for autumn foliage, the temple gardens are spectacular year-round. The photo above shows the path that leads from the gardens (and pagoda hill) down to the temple’s beautiful lake.
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Nezu Jinja lies in Tokyo’s Bunkyō ward, and has since Shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi ordered the shine moved to its current location in 1705. The shrine is perhaps best known for its extensive azalea garden, which erupt in color every April (there’s even an azalea festival at the shrine each spring), but I visited for the first time last December and can attest it’s worth a visit in any season.
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Today we continue the virtual tour of Hakone Shrine with a trip to the water gate. In the Shintō faith, torii (the red-orange gate in the images) mark the boundary between the secular and the sacred – though on occasion, it often seems that the areas on both sides of the torii are equally sacred. The water gate at Hakone Shrine is one of those places.
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Last week, I started a virtual tour of Hakone Jinja (Shrine), one of my favorite Shintō shrines in Japan – and today, we continue that tour with a look at the shrine’s main courtyard and worship hall. In some ways, the layout of Shintō shrines varies more than Buddhist temple architecture, in part because of the way Shintō attempts to integrate the shrine with the natural landscape. Hakone Jinja is no exception. The main courtyard, where the worship hall stands, sits uphill from the entrance. Because of the distance, and the fact that several paths lead up to the worship hall
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(To read this series from the beginning, click here!) Hakone Shrine sits on the shore of Lake Ashi, in a grove of massive, sacred trees. The scents of pine and cedar follow visitors up the shaded paths. In winter months you may also catch a whiff of wood smoke in the air. After visiting the purification fountain, most visitors either head down to the water gate on the shore of Lake Ashi or up the steps to the shrine’s main worship hall.
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Hakone Jinja (Hakone Shrine) sits on the shore of Lake Ashi (Ashinoko) in Hakone, Kanagawa Prefecture – about an hour’s journey south of Tokyo. Its giant lakeside torii makes it among the most picturesque Shintō shrines, as well as an important historical, tourist, and religious site.
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