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.