As I described in Part I, I had a rather spectacular day golfing. Thinking that the day was over, I was by my friend that we should visit the Rabbit Shrine. Unfortunately, the summer festival was the week before. Of course, I could not see the summer festival because the businesses were closed, and my purpose of coming was to talk to people. However, I was still excited as we walked down the crowded street to the shrine.
The shrine is not enormous, but there are rabbits everywhere. It is the shrine that is dedicated to the Rabbit, as in year of the Rabbit, known both to the Japanese and the Chinese. The original shrine dates back 1800 years, and I’m not sure if there is dirt in California that is that old.
In the small court yard there is a covering over a Rabbit fountain. ou are supposed to dip out the water in front of the rabbit and put over your hands for purity. I didn’t do it, but thought it interesting of the washing of water to be clean.
This is the main shrine in the area, although it is not 1800 years old (and we’ll see that in a minute.) It is a scared place, in which you can go to the front of the porch where there is a red and white rope. You say your prayer, then you ring a bell that the rope is tied to.
This old woman was doing exactly that. There is another inner room that you can go into during certain times of the year (or maybe if you have a certain donation level.)
There was a young woman there that explained the history to my friend. Then he told me in English. I was afraid somebody would ask me to stop taking pictures, but they didn’t seem to mind.
They had some very ornate carving on the beams, and as I said before, almost all of the carvings featured the rabbit in one way or the other.
As I said before, the big impressive shrine is not the original one. The original one is this one. It is much, much smaller, and it make more sense. At one time, may years ago, this was a small grove, with no city around it. People would come to this small place to pray to the rabbit god.
The shrine didn’t take long, and afterwards, Ebitani-san suggest that we find a tea house that he had seen on the internet. We walked through some houses to find this on the back lot. We walked up to the screen door and took off our shoes. And walked into the moderately sized sitting room for room for about 30 people.
This woman told us of the history of the house. It was about 120 years old and was part of a tea factory that had been in this place. The house had survived several big earth quakes, and had been a central feature of the area for many years. If not for the internet, however, I have no idea how anybody would find it.
Ebitani-san selected cold green tea because the outside weather had warmed a little bit, and a sweet snack, which was made of some type of gelatin and some inner filled bean curd. The tea was excellent Japanese green tea over ice. It had a nice bite to it, and the snack was generally pleasing. Our hostess came back and told us that we should upstairs to the paintings.
We headed to the back of the building, and up the rear stair case. The ceiling was low, and ready to bang me on the head. One the way up, you could clearly see the construction of the house.
The walls were mixed mud and straw. A common building material used by many cultures and people in many lands. However, it it had been holding for 120 years, it seemed like a good choice. Obviously, they had done a lot of work to modernize this house, and it had electricity and air conditioning. But the original frame was there.
We got up to the top floor, and while the beams were ready to kill me, there ws an artist and two rooms of her pictures. Evidently, there had been multiple earth quakes in Tokyo over many years. During these times, people had moved out to Saitama area, and the area had lots of artists and writers.
She was doing abstract art. This is not my favorite type, but I did see one picture called sunrise that I liked. I didn’t’ think it fair to take a picture of her work, but you can see a little bit of a picture behind me in the picture below with the head threatening beam.
Ready to make the most of the day, Ebitani-san picked up his two daughters so we could all go to Korean dinner together.
It was very neat to see a family that lived together. His youngest is a freshman and the old is graduating in just a few months. My friend is very proud of his daughters, and they have tested well. He confessed to me that he was so into playing the bass in high school (he is a very good musician) that he did not get good grades. However, his old daughter has just gotten a good company job selling mainframe computers, and he is very, very happy.
I asked him, “Does this mean that she moves out?”
He said, “I hope not, it is good for her to be home until she gets married.”
I would like to call out to my old daughter that all good fathers think this way. I agreed this was a good idea.
After a very large Korean meal, my friend drove me into my hotel in Tokyo. I offered to take the subway, but he would not hear of it.
It was a very enjoyable and amazing day in Japan. Not often do you get to see so much in such a little time.
