HI EVERYBODY I AM MARY AND I AM UPDATING THIS BLOG LIKE WHOA.
That was a lie.
I'm actually Dana, who is staying with Mary for Christmas. I normally blog over here, but Mary and I decided to switch blogs for an evening. You can head over to my normal blog to see Mary's post!
Anyway, I am supposed to blog about WHAT WE HAVE BEEN DOING, so I will DO THAT.*
Yesterday (Friday), we headed over to Takeo Shrine, because I am a huge Shrine Nerd (it's my research project) and also because it is close enough to walk to. Yay!
In other news, my camera is not the greatest, sometimes.
Here's the front of the shrine and the back of a Mary.
Apparently in Saga prefecture, they are Super Into Enshrining the Glorious War Dead.** This is a "remembering stone" for them.
Here are some omamori*** which were being sold at the shrine office. Who says you can't mix the sacred with Hello Kitty?
We're enshrining the glorious war dead...AGAIN. Just over here instead.
Here's a little shrine on the grounds. It has a mirror inside it, because mirrors are generally seen as sacred objects. That's mostly because of a very long story involving the sun goddess hiding in a cave and another goddess performing a strip tease...but, yes, mirrors. They are important. And you will see them around shrines a lot.
So then we walked away from the main shrine and through this bizarre wood, where one side is pine trees and the other side is bamboo????
This is what the shrine is famous for--a giant, 3,000-year-old tree. WOW. Pictures cannot capture how amazingly cool this thing is.
Apparently Hayao Miyazaki was influenced by trees in Saga Prefecture while making Princess Mononoke, and I can see why. SO COOL.
And then we took a detour and wound up next to a sketchy pond-moat thing with some Jizo**** on the other side.
So then we walked a whole bunch to the Mt. Mifune Gardens.
Unfortunately, what with it being winter and all, the gardens were kind of dead and sad looking.
BUT THE MOUNTAIN WAS COOL.
But we couldn't climb the mountain.
And we were sad.
There were still some nice momiji, though.
So after that we left and Mary somehow managed to get us onto a mountain road with NO SIDEWALK and a PRECIPICE on one side and a FOREST on the other and it was very, very 危ない.
But we were not hit by cars and did not fall off any precipices, so it was all good.
So then we climbed a big hill...
...and got a view of Mary's town!
She lives in the super inaka (countryside), if this wasn't already clear.
OH HEY LOOK IT'S ANOTHER STONE FOR THE GLORIOUS WAR DEAD. Although this one enshrines soldiers from Saga Prefecture specifically.
Takeo is apparently really into their glorious war dead?
This was our dinner that night, made by ME because I told Mary I would be her 主婦 (housewife) and I wasn't kidding.
OH MY GOSH IT'S A MARY.
Also, she totally ate seconds, so I win at the world.
And then I made Mary watch Misfits and menaced her with fetuses***** and passed out.
Today!
Mary's friend Tatara-san, who she knows from tea ceremony, offered to show us random awesome things around, so we got up bright and early (okay, not that early) to meet up with her. She, by the way, is an awesome lady and was really fun to talk to and hang out with.
So! The first stop of the day was Yutoku Inari Shrine.
It is HUGE. And also on stilts.
And also HUGE.
Did I mention that it is huge and built on a mountain?
So Mary and I, being the intrepid relatively young people we are, decided to climb to the top of the mountain. And thus began Our Adventure with Stair-Like Topography.
Oh, hey, this kind of looks like Fushimi Inari! (If, for some reason, you want to read a really long and kind of spastic explanation of why there are so many Inari shrines, you can click over here.)
Hmm, we're pretty high up.
LET'S GO HIGHER.
Toriiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii.
There were lots of little wayside shrines (owned by specific families/organizations) along the way, just like at Fushimi Inari.
MUST CLIMB HIGHER.
And thus began our adventure with stairs. Notice how gingerly these people are climbing down.
This is what a section of reasonably stair-like stairs looked like.
STAIRS.
Random Buddha statue at a Shinto shrine! Yay, syncretism!
We made it to the top!
And here's the tiny shrine at the top.
If you want to go up there
you have to climb the stairs
oh no
I'm sorry, but they're not even trying at this point. WHAT ARE THESE SUPPOSED TO BE.
Mary demonstrates expert stair climbing technique.
Technique #1: If I crawl, maybe the stairs won't notice me.
Technique #2: If I cling to random objects on the wayside, maybe the stairs can't buck me off.
Technique #3: AHHHH THIS IS LIKE IF SOMEONE DESCRIBED STAIRS TO A BLIND GUY WHO HAD NEVER BEEN NEAR STAIRS BEFORE AND THEN HE RELAYED THE MESSAGE TO HIS PARTIALLY DEAF SON WHO TRANSLATED IT INTO A FOREIGN LANGUAGE BY USING A DICTIONARY WHICH AN ARCHITECT TURNED INTO BLUE PRINTS
This is the only explanation.
But we made it safely to the bottom!
Also, the snazzy scarf I am wearing is not mine; I totally stole it from Mary.
All that climbing and fearing for our lives had made us hungry, so then we headed out for lunch.
OM NOM NOM NOM. The two brown things on the right are called Inari sushi; they're fried bean curd wrapped around rice soaked in a kind of sweet vinegar. DELICIOUS.
Then, Tatara-san got a glint in her eye and insisted on paying for lunch for us, because each day only exists once and we would only have this one lunch together. So we got free lunch.
And then we got cream puffs. Because, you know, each day only exists once, and sometimes you just really want cream puffs.
(Also, Tatara-san got us Christmas cakes, because she is a sweetheart. And also because she and Mary are in the midst of a gift-giving war, and I was collateral damage. But Mary and I are planning a counterattack; yes, we are. IT SHALL BE SUCH A COUNTERATTACK.)
So then we went to Arita, which is a pottery town in Saga Prefecture. And by pottery town, I mean, SUPER FAMOUS FOR POTTERY. As it turned out, Tatara-san used to work at Koransha, which is a SUPER FAMOUS POTTERY MANUFACTURER, and so we stopped by and got tea and looked at super gorgeous pottery. Also, Tatara-san got us cups because "it is Christmas AND EVERY DAY ONLY COMES ONCE." Pictures shall come when pictures come, but I got a LITTLE PRINCE CUP BECAUSE I LOVE THE LITTLE PRINCE OH MY GOODNESS. (Mary got a cup that actually made her look like an adult with sophisticated tastes, but LITTLE PRINCE.)
So then we went over to Imari, which is another pottery town. It was a Tokugawa-era pottery enclave, which meant that the Tokugawa shogunate said, "HEY, YOU GUYS, you are good at making pottery. You should make pottery for your whole lives. And your children should make pottery. And you should never leave. And when we say 'should' we mean 'it is mandatory or we will stab you lots and lots.'"
But it's still a pottery town now!
It is also in the super inaka.
And there are MOUNTAINS.
And there were these frog statues with a Magikarp on top. Because why not?
So then we started heading home, but on the way back we stopped by Kurokami Shrine.
I will transform Mary's blog into a blog ALL ABOUT SHRINES.
Also, because it was freezing cold (there was snow at one point), Tatara-san lent Mary her ruff-stole-thing (I don't know the correct terminology). So Mary looked like a sophisticated adult while I ran around the shrine like a maniac.
Shrine, shrine, shrine, shrine!
We've been seeing these prepared bonfires at a bunch of different shrines, because one part of the New Year's celebration in Japan is burning all the omamori from the previous year in a big ceremony called Ooharai. There are other things burned during that ceremony as well (like little paper figures which people write their names on to attach their bad luck and pollution and then burn to get rid of it), so they need many, many bonfires.
So then we headed back for reals.
All in all, a pretty awesome day!
Thank you, Tatara-san!
And then I made Mary dinner because I am her 主婦. Yup.
And now we are writing BLOGS. And Mary is waving pie pans at me. Because she is making pie. Now she's invading her neighbor's house.****** Her life is so exciting compared to mine. I just have people throw mochi at my head.
Tomorrow we will be celebrating Christmas, which means that we will open SIX MILLION PRESENTS and then we are going to meet up with some of Mary's other ALT friends for Christmas luncheon.
I hope everyone celebrating has a merry Christmas! And everyone not celebrating has a good 25th of December.
The next post on here will be from Mary, and hopefully it will be soon. Not that I'm hinting anything. Oh no, not me.
Maryifyoudon'tupdatesoonIwillmenaceyouwithfetuses.
*If you don't already know me, I am a little bit spastic. I also write the same way I speak, which means I WILL EMPHASIZE THINGS WITH CAPITALS LETTERS. Also, I love footnotes.
**That is, the souls of all the soldiers who have died in every war (or every not-war in some cases) since 1868-ish. There's a huge controversy surrounding their enshrinement, so if you are interested, I recommend To Dream of Dreams or Shinto and the State, 1868-1988.
***Omamori, most commonly translated as "amulets," are little objects believed to contain the essence of the deity of a specific shrine. They most commonly come in the form of little brocaded bags (with a scrap of sacred text inside) and are believed to grant a certain wish, like "safety from traffic accidents" or "success in examinations."
****Jizo is a Buddhist bodhisattva. Most Japanese statues portray him like the image above...kind of like a short, squat baby?
*****Okay, so, the context here is that I'm currently reading Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan. So I have been learning how to menace. With fetuses.
******Okay, so she had his permission, but that makes the story significantly more boring. IT WAS AN INVASION. MARY WAS RIDING ON A HORSE WITH AN ARMY OF TINY MARYS BEHIND HER. THERE WERE DRUMS AND TRUMPETS AND ALSO PIE PANS.
