Category: Traditional

Neighbourhood temples

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date August 20, 2020

I have been with the home office for seven months now, since “the first wave” ended I have been taking walks through the back streets of Tokyo to stretch my legs and refresh my mind. Every day go a little bit further away trying to discover some special place that I did not know.

I have been finding Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, that although they do not appear in the travel guides, for me each of them has a certain unique charm. This first photo is not from an unknown sanctuary. It is the temizuya 手水舎 (Place to purify-wash hands) that is standing as a measure to prevent the spread of covid-19. Normally there are buckets to fill the water that comes out of the bamboo cane. Now the fountain is stopped and they have put up an information sign.

But they have created an alternative in which they avoid having to all be in the same mouth of a source and have eliminated the saucepans. This is a video of the new temizuya for times of covid-19:

In this other sanctuary they have put up a sign at the entrance warning that there is a dangerous raven. Watch out for the raven!

This is a tiny shrine in Aoyama, it is hidden among several houses , although I had walked by it many times I had never noticed its presence.

This is an abandoned shimenawa rope

This is koma-inu (koma dog) status with many details, notice the muscles and the hair.

Buddhist temple at sunset time.

Mini statue (less than 10 centimeters tall)

I found a tiger!

Traditional

Living on the floor

First it was hard for me to take off my shoes every time I entered a Japanese house or private space. Now I’ve become so used to it that when I’m back in Spain I tend to take off my shoes even in the cases I’m not supposed to.

My subconscious tells me that it is not good to walk into a house with my dirty shoes. Even if the shoes are not really dirty, the fact that the shoes have been “outside” makes them “dirty”, or “not-pure” enough to touch the floor of an interior place.

I’ve found that living on the floor has its advantages. I love that it makes even tiny houses look wider when you are inside. By forcing you to be on the floor you tend to have less furniture. If I really need furniture I try to buy “low” ones (low chairs, low tables etc), so I have good access to them even when I’m sitting on the floor. It also makes everything look like much less cluttered than when we fill our rooms with “high” bookshelfs/beds/kitchen-tables like we do in western houses.

Take off your shoes, sit on the floor next to a window filled with sunlight, read a book while drinking a tea.

Architecture Traditional

Urban Mini Temple

Post author By ageekinjapan
Post date May 25, 2015

When strolling around the streets of Japanese cities one of the things that I enjoy the most is bumping into small Buddhist temples or Shintoist mini shrines. Sometimes they are so well integrated into the architecture of the buildings that you might not even notice them when passing by.

mini temple