Ten Days in Japan -- Part 4

The Experiences of Some American Tanuki in Japan

Leaving the warm rain, dew, mists, and occasional sheets of watery transparent sunshine in Kii-Katsuura, we took the tourist bus to Kumano Nachi Taisha. Nachi is one of the three Kumano Sanzan shrines.

http://www.tb-kumano.jp/en/world-heritage/kumano_sanzan/

All three shrines are World Heritage Sites but that isn’t what makes them special. These sites are obviously sacred, and have been so longer than anyone is prepared to admit. What they enshrine are mysteries no one can explain, except to say the walls have worn rather thin between our various worlds and a number of other worlds, parallel realities and divine things. We could repeat beliefs and stories about the powers of creation, the descent of the spirit into the flesh, purity, impurity, redemption, or even the first arrival of the ancient gods on this earth. We could even speculate about the secret power of toads to return to us some of the important treasures we have lost in our lives. But I don’t actually know the secrets.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

The Nachi temple complex has been climbing a mountain for many centuries and people have faithfully climbed up the mountain after it.

If the sacredness of a temple is proportionate to the number of staircases that must be climbed to reach it, then the Nachi Shrines are high holiness. It is a very long way up.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Along the lower flights of stairs there are lots of convenient landings and shops to break the climb but about halfway up the stairs break free of the lower structures and become monumental. We lost count of the number of discrete flights.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

They say the original god worshipped here was the waterfall itself, and the first temple was at the base of the falls. The current shrines have surmounted the shoulder of a mountain and include a spectacular pagoda.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

We have had a modest painting on silk of this scene around the house for years; it has hung variously in bedrooms, living rooms and stairwells and we always wondered if it represented a real place or was an imagined scene. It turns out to be real and a lot less minimalistic.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

There is a more intimate degree of astonishment at the finer details.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

It’s in the nature of the grand shrines to sell things. Exchanging goods is a basic human activity and all the needs and choices served by the temple shops bring religion vividly into this life. Amulets, fortunes, charms and divinations, memorial candles and incense and a variety of other prayer items, as well as souvenirs, are displayed for sale by acolytes and shrine maidens. Buddhist and Shinto sects built their temples side by side here, and the charms and prayer items come in two flavors. The more pragmatic believer might opt to patronize both, like the old Shoguns did, to cover both this world and the next. The agnostic has that many more bets to hedge and a vaster than usual range of skepticism to exercise, while the true atheist finally comes into his own with a practically limitless array of things to disbelieve in. It is hard to imagine anyone going away unhappy, or empty handed either.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Most stirring to me, though, was an ancient opening in the woods, reached by what might have been the oldest flight of stone steps on the property: the Kumano Kodo, or Kumano Incense Path. We would see this again farther north and get to walk some of it.

Photograph by Alexander Mawyer

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Then we took the bus back to Katsuura, changed to the Shingu bus line, got off the bus in Shingu and waited in the shade on a wooden bench outside the bus station, drinking odd cold beverages from vending machines until the bus to Yunomine Onsen rolled up.

Photograph by Gary Mawyer

Cattycorners from the bus station we saw a very nice temple with roof tiles a tantalizing shade of rusty orange. On the way out of Shingu we saw the grounds of the newest of the three Kumano Sanzan shrines, Kumano Hayatama Taisha, only a millennium old.

In retrospect we were moving too fast. We could have stayed in Shingu and relished this shrine too. We also knew full well how badly we needed a laundromat and two spare hours to use it. Considering the quiet of the bus station, the restful chirrup of the cicadas, the idle pop of carbonated mystery sodas (because you never knew what you would get), and the occasional small child gawking at the huge foreigners from a safe distance, time did not seem to be moving at all. Time seemed to have stopped on an August afternoon in Shingu, but we should have known we were floating bubbles racing past, glimpsing an hour or so of eternity, remembering it as the silken pages of a book of dreams, and we never did get to the laundromat.