How Exotic do you Care to Get?

Nothing would be easier than to present another country as a place full of bizarre sights and contradictions, and Japan seemed doubly strange to me because the language is opaque to me. What's hard to judge is how important or ordinary these things are to the Japanese people themselves.

The characters on this huge screen, our student guide told us, stand for the guardians to the temple we were visiting. I don't think anything in the West is similar to the calligraphy so prized in Japan and China. Someone ignorant of the writing system can admire the work, and I do. But many dimensions of the work are simply beyond my reach. Our student guide said he could read the characters. I can only imagine how he might respond to them.

The use of natural-seeming boulders in landscaping a garden also expresses something very deep about the traditional Japanese attitude toward living in nature, and you'd only see it in the West in imitation of Japan.
But what does a foreign visitor make of this scene:

The papers attached to the form are wishes for good fortune, and by crawling through the hole in it, you can improve your luck. A lot of young people were having a great time, crawling through the hole and taking pictures of each other. Do they believe it can be effective, or is it a lark? Or both?

This deity can also give you good luck if you put some some coins in the box with the slats on it and bow to him. We saw plenty of people going through that ritual, as well as lined up to purify their hands with water from a sacred mountain spring, also to get good luck.

What do these expressions of popular religion have to do with the classical calligraphy and Zen gardens, or with the exquisite ceramics that the store owner was generous enough to let me photograph?

As a tourist, you have to keep yourself open to whatever crosses your path and appreciate it for what it seems to be, without trying to understand everything or fit it into a coherent concept.

Little Temples all over the Place

Along with the huge temples and shrines, central Kyoto is dotted with smaller, old wooden temples. Here are a few I saw while casually walking down the street. I saw a couple of Shinto shrines in shopping malls, too.

full

India gets a lot of spiritual tourism, but, as far as I know, Japan gets very little.
India gets a lot of spiritual tourism, but, as far as I know, Japan gets very little.

None of our student guides admitted to being religious, and none of them could tell me very much about how one becomes a monk or priest connected with a temple, who sites belong to, who maintains them, or what exactly is done in them.
A quick search for "study Zen in Japan" turned up dozens of sites offering instruction and retreats. So it wouldn't have been hard to find someone better informed about spiritual life in Japan, if we'd had more time to prepare for the trip.

The Unfairness of Photography

It's just too easy to make a beautiful image.

Japan is very Japanese

We arrived in Japan on Friday, January 29, and took the train from the airport in Tokyo to Kyoto. As stupid as this sounds, as we looked out the window of the train from Narita Airport to the Shinagawa station in Tokyo, where we transferred to the bullet train to Kyoto, we passed villages and couldn't get over how typically Japanese they looked. It's kind of like landing in London and discovering that everyone speaks with a British accent. They aren't just putting it on.

Not that this picture was taken from the train window. It's a view of Kyoto from the Philosopher's Path, where we were taken by a charming volunteer student guide, Fukuda Mutumi (who is now a FB friend of mine).
Here's a picture of Judith with Mutumi:

Judith found out about a group of student volunteers in Kyoto (the Good Samaritan Club) who take tourists around for free (we treated them to transportation, museum entrances, and a lunch), giving visitors a chance to meet young Japanese people, and giving them a chance to use their English.
I started off in Japan wearing a very old trench coat, which I planned to replace with a lightweight Uniqlo coat like Judith's.

I did manage to buy a new coat and discarded this old heavy thing with a light heart.
We were as much interested in the stores and stands that lined the path up to the temples as we were in the temples themselves, because they were so lively. We weren't attracted to the Japanese sweets, but Judith couldn't resist this fried potato swirl:

Kyoto is on a human scale, a good place to start taking Japan in. Because we don't know the language and can't read the signs, we were fortunate in having the students to help us figure things out. While lots of what you see in the street is totally 21st century urban, some things are mystifying to a foreigner.