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Advertising Traditional

Sponsors inside Meiji Jingu temple

When I visited the Meiji Jingu temple for the Hatsumode tradition there were lots of sake bottles at the altar from different famous distilleries that pay to have their bottles placed next to the Gods. By doing this they hope business will go well in the future.
The funny thing is that there were Coke and Sprite bottles as well (The sign says Tokyo Coca-Cola bottling company). The monk was sitting down next to the Coke bottles during the whole ceremony :). I wonder how much The Coca-Cola Company payed to have those bottles placed right there in the most visited Hatsumode ceremony in the country. Can you imagine a Christian priest with Coke bottles next to the altar during mass?

Meiji Jingu
Altar overview

Meiji Jingu
Sponsors inside the temple!

Categories
Traditional

Ryoan-ji – 龍安寺

Ryoan-ji Zen temple is a temple located in Kyoto renowned for the beauty of its dry garden, which is said to cause tranquility and peacefulness to those that contemplate it.

Ryoanji

The garden is composed by 15 different rocks arranged in 3 big groups in a way that all the rocks can only be seen at the same time from one point. When looking at the arrangement the first thing you notice is the group on the left, and then your attention flows slowly to the center eventually ending at the big group to the right. If you want to see all the rocks at the same time you have to stand at the far right.

Ryoanji
Standing on the spot from where you can view all 15 rocks.

The big mystery of this little garden is that nobody knows its meaning, nor the reason why it produces so much tranquility and peacefulness to its visitors. The designer of the dry garden is unknown, as well as his intention and the design process he followed. One of the traditional interpretations says that the rocks look like a tiger crossing a river, other interpretations say that they are Chinese mountains over a sea of clouds and so on. But it turns out that those interpretations are not on the right track, as Zen emphasizes the emptiness, the nothing.

“-What’s so special about the garden at Ryoanji?
-The spaces between the rocks” – Alan Booth

In 2002, a group of University of Kyoto scientists used computers to look for shapes in the empty areas of the garden instead of the rock areas. The result was that they found a tree pattern hidden inside the structure of the garden. They say that is the reason why it is so pleasant to contemplate the garden because our subconscious grasps the tree pattern without us noticing it.

The same research team moved some rocks randomly and saw that the harmony of the initial configuration was easily lost. Because of that, they think the configuration of the garden is thoroughly thought and not achieved by coincidence.

The researchers applied Voronoi algorithm, which looks for the farthest point from the rocks. In other words, the algorithm looks for the emptiest areas and marks them with lines. They joined all the lines obtained with the algorithm and a tree shape appeared. The tree branches converged where supposedly the monks have to meditate.

In the following image the black lines are drawn by the algorithm. The blue rectangle marks the dry garden. The red rectangle marks the central area of the temple. The red dot is where all the branches that are generated in the empty areas of the garden converge, and where the best viewing spot is. The green dot is from where you can see all 15 rocks at the same time.

Ryoanji
Image taken and modified from here.

So it seems that mathematics can explain somehow the beauty of the garden. The interesting thing is that the monk that designed the place 500 years ago didn’t have computers, probably didn’t know much about maths and obviously didn’t know about the Voronoi algorithm. However he concluded that this arrangement was ideal. The scientists conjecture about the possibility that it is possible to find patterns in the subconscious through Zen meditation and bring them to the conscious part of the mind.

Ryoanji
High resolution picture

Categories
Sex Traditional

Kanamara matsuri – Japanese dicks festival

Yesterday I went with my friends Ignacio and Take to the Kanamara traditional festival near Kawasaki. The wikipedia translates it as the Festival of the Steel Phallus. It is Shinto fertility festival dedicated to the penis celebrated every year at Kawasakidaishi.

It was so fun, estrange and surrealistic… I don’t know how to explain it in words so I’ll let you see the pictures and the video I took:

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin

kanamara matsuri picha falo polla chinchin