1st Project Visit #3

I just returned from my 3rd and most interesting visit from the shrine. Today my goal was to interact with some people at the shrine and I had the idea of buying “omamori” from the stand there. Omamori are essentially Shinto good luck charms. There is omamori for all different sorts of wishes. Safety while driving, scoring well on entrance exams finding a partner, and happiness are just a few examples. Today the shrine was almost completely empty and I was surprised to see so few people there. The big fire that I had seen the last two times also wasn't there. I went up to the stand and asked the woman working there what the different kinds of omamori meant. She was wearing big flowing orange pants and a white top. I chose two types of omamori, one for my boyfriend who is visiting right now and came to the shrine with me and one for myself. Mine is little and shaped like a monkey and wishes for happiness. His wish is for safety while driving as he recently got in a fairly bad accident. The woman seemed happy to explain the omamori to me and was very helpful. I took a few pictures of the stand after asking permission. In addition, rather than just watch people pray at the shrine, today I too walked up the steps to the offertory, threw my coin in, rang the bell and said a short prayer.
To be honest, before I went to the shrine I thought that doing that would be a good level of interaction to have for today’s assignment. However, as I was walking around a man approached me and completely changed my experience. He started by asking me in English where I was from. I told him that I was from America and we got to chatting a little about basic introduction type stuff. When he didn’t understand something I said, I repeated in Japanese and once he realized I could speak well we started conversing in Japanese. We had a long conversation, I would estimate about a half and hour and we talked about so much. He started out by saying that he was Shinto and that he was very interested in Japanese culture and he was greatly saddened by the decline of religion and traditional culture in Japan. He told me that a lot of Japanese don’t know very much about Shinto anymore and it’s upsetting to him. For example, you’re not supposed to take pictures in shrines because it angers the gods. I apologized to him because right before we had begun talking I had been snapping away. He said he wasn’t upset at me because I was a foreigner and have no way of knowing these things but Japanese should at least know their own culture. He also said that you’re not supposed to walk down the middle path in shrines because that is reserved for the gods, yet everyone walks down that path nowadays. He explained some things about Shinto to me, which was really helpful because I had been wondering these things every time I went there. Shinto has over 10 million different gods. Apparently this shrine is dedicated to the mountain god and for this reason there are monkey statues all around. Monkeys live in the mountains and are considered these gods helpers. They are also good for fertility, which is why many of the monkey statues are holding children. The water you wash your hands with outside the shrine has to do with the first man and first woman who were created from drops of water.
The man I met also talked about a lot of rather unrelated things that I found pretty surprising. He faulted the decline of religion in Japan to Teddy Roosevelt who believed Japan would be too difficult to manipulate if it had a strong religious core. I told him that I come to this shrine often and always see plenty of people here so why do people still come if they don’t believe properly. His response was that he wasn’t sure but he believed that Shinto was embedded in Japanese DNA. A sort of odd response but I let it slide. He talked about the Russo-Japan War and Japan’s defeat in World War II. He believed that Japan lost, in part, because farmers became soldiers and were not subject to the intense training of the samurai and therefore not as well prepared to fight. At this point, I realized he is probably a pretty intense nationalist but he was interesting so I didn’t try to argue or cut him off. He reiterated his interest in Japanese culture and said that it is sad to him that kimonos are not handmade in Japan anymore. He told me that he has kimonos that are over 80 years old in his house and you just can’t buy good kimonos anymore.
Overall, it was a very strange encounter but an interesting one at least. I was grateful to have someone explain some aspects of Shinto to me and hear an opinion about the role of Shinto in the lives of regular Japanese. Even his tangents were interesting although I was confused as to why he told me so much. In the end though, I feel lucky he approached me because I would not have known nearly as much about the shrine without him.