Nagoya. Started the day off at Atsuta-jinja, one of the three most important shrines in the country. Since I am not a practitioner of Shinto, I usually go to shrines to take photographs--generally of the grounds and particularly of the roofs.
Today, everything but the traditional-style forked roof underwhelmed me. Even the pond was too dark to see the koi fish. But it ended up being one of the most exciting stops I made because...
...there were children everywhere in cute little kimonos. In November, there is a festival for young children called Shichi-go-san (literally "7-5-3"). It is celebrated for three- and five-year old boys and three- and seven-year old girls. Children are dressed in expensive kimonos and taken to shrines to pray for health and long, happy lives. Today I saw mothers and grandmothers who had also dressed up with the children. (I've got too many pictures to put them up here, but will save more for a later post.) And just as I had my camera poised to take another picture of a child, one of the mothers started yelling, "Look, look!" Everyone whipped around to see...
...a wedding procession! It is definitely a very rare occurrence to see everyone in full garb at a shrine on a weekday. Here the bride and groom--dressed in white and black, respectively--follow the priest and two attendants. The parents walk behind the couple. In this case, I'm not sure who the woman holding the bride's hand is; her kimono is too plain for her to be the mother (see the more extravagant one behind the bride?). Other processions will be some variant of this.
After leaving the shrine I took the subway to Nagoya-jo, one of the country's largest and most significant castles. This is a reconstruction as the original was fire-bombed during WWII.
For being in the right place at the right time, I got a free personal tour of the grounds given by a volunteer guide who spoke English. After spending a couple of hours wandering through the palace and the castle, I know a lot more than I did before about their design and about feudal defense strategies...
From the castle, I went to take a few photos of Nagoya TV Tower, and then on to Ōsu Kannon, a Buddhist temple.
Afterwards, I went to try Nagoya's famous tebasaki chicken wings for dinner, and then a trip to the 46th floor of a nearby building to enjoy the view.
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| Karai tebasaki kara-age: spicy deep-fried chicken wings |
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| The castle is lit up in the center |
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