Time to fess up

So, looks like it's come to be about that time. I've got three weeks left in Japan, every other day brings yet another person looking me gravely in the eyes and saying "Sayounara- if I don't see you ever again, have a good life", and I guess I have to admit both to myself and everyone out there in Blog Land that this story is pretty close to over.

I'll lose internet access on the 20th- so this is the beginning of my ten-day countdown.

Until then, here's what I've been up to recently:

I visited the Shrines at Ise two weeks ago, and I'm still waiting for my copy of the pictures. When I get them, I'll post them here, but until then:

Ise is The Main Shinto Shrine in Japan. It's composed of two shrines, really: the Outer Shrine, housing the goddess of food and industry, and the Inner Shrine, housing the Sun Goddess Herself. The site is so holy that to avoid impurity, they tear down and reconstruct from scratch all of the buildings every twenty years using only traditional no-nails interlocking beam-and-dowel construction, and the relics within are transferred to the brand-new buildings, at which point the old building is torn apart and the wood is given away to lesser shrines, so they can build their torii (shrine gates) out of the holy remains of the shrines.

You also can't actually SEE any of these shrines. They're surrounded by big, multilayered walls to keep the normal folks like you, me, and the general Japanese public far, far away from the holy items. The monks themselves haven't ever seen the holy relic that's enshrined in the Inner Shrine- the Holy Mirror of Amaterasu. They keep that one in a brocade bag, and when one bag starts to wear thin, they just wrap it up in another one. The guidebook snarkily mentions that these layers and layers of cloth wrapping "probably contain a sample of the best brocade work in Japan"- but we'll never, ever see it.

Even though I spent something like six hours on a train getting to and from a bunch of walled-up wooden buildings, the crowds of pilgrims, the cool minor shrines around the edges (hello, Wind God. How are you?) and the thought that the gods ACTUALLY PHYSICALLY LIVE in this place was well worth the whole deal. Very immediate faith, Shinto is... the Sun Goddess has a mailing address.

The next weekend (i.e. last weekend) I went the other direction entirely and saw a crazy-famous Buddhist temple in Uji- the Byodo-in. Byodo-in houses the "Phoenix Hall"- one of the most instantly recognizable temple buildings in Japan, as it's printed on the back of their 10-yen coin. Again, pictures are forthcoming, but in the meantime...

What struck me most about this temple was the fact that it, like almost all of the Buddhist temples in this country, was warm monochromatic brown wood. That's the color scheme, that's the way things go... but this one was old enough that it still showed faded paintings from back when Japanese Buddhism and Chinese Buddhism held the same design aesthetic. The whole place used to be filled with bright, crazy reds, greens, blues, and yellows, intricately painted statues of boddhisatvas, a golden Buddha sitting in the center of the hall... but now, it's just chips of paint embedded in the cedar, faded paintings on giant swinging panel doors, and a golden Buddha-Under-Reconstruction, with black lacquer showing through his layer of gold foil. The halo and pedestal of the big guy were still recieving their tender loving care, so they weren't up on display with the rest- and it gave the temple a very empty, austere, ghostlike feeling. There used to be colors, and music... now, there's just the one big bell, and faded paint exposed directly to the outdoors. The temple rests in the middle of a pond, built on a foundation of smooth stones- it looks like it could be floating- and the two phoenixes on the roof stare at each other quizzically, like they were wondering what the heck happened to the interior design team.

Don't get me wrong- it was beautiful- but it was beautiful in the same way a graveyard can be beautiful. Sad and sunbleached.

In desperate need of a pick-me-up, yesterday was an Osaka Extravanganza- science museum, National Gallery of Art, and some great Mexican food at one of the two Mexican restaurants in the entire Kansai region. As I understand it, there are two in Osaka, a few in Tokyo, and none anywhere else. When will the Japanese nation recognize the simple beauty of a burrito served from a drive-through window?

pax