NEWS OF TRAVEL JAPAN

My wife and I planned overnight stay at a syukubo, a pilgrim’s lodging at a temple, before visiting Koya-San. Our intention was simple, we had a fascination with the activities of recent foreign travelers in deep Japan, some of them have stayed in syukubos. There are more than fifty syukubos in Koya-San. For many current Japanese people, of course for us too, syukubos are far from their useful convenient hotels. If we stay at a syukubo at any rate, an extraordinary essence is desirable for our experience. At last we decided to stay at the syukubo of part of the world heritage site of Koya-San, Kongo Sanmai-in. Koya-san( 1 ) At the syukubo Kongo Sanmai-in is on the outskirt of the town. Once we arrived at the gate of Kongo Sanmai-in at 4 o’clock, many worshipers who didn’t seem to be guests had been taking photos there. We didn’t know the place to stay and we were afraid of making a mistake of the place, then we asked a guide man in the small reception room where we should go. He ...

From now I want to write about Koya-san. Here is the north-west place of Koya-san, the entrance gate of Koya-san, and on a gentle hill with many trees. The gate made by two tall stones separates the land into two worlds. One is this world and the other is the sacred world, Koya-san. On outside nearby the gate, The Nyonin-do, the praying house for women, stands quietly, because the house hasn’t been used since the Meiji period. On the contrary till the Edo period the house had been full of many women who had come to pray or had come with worries whether their sons devoting themselves to Koya-san had been healthy or not. Because women had been forbidden to enter inside the gate (of course, now there is no such thing as the prohibition of women entering). As in the picture above, a narrow path along a cliff from The Nyonin-do made a route semi-circled around Koya-san and the length of the route is approximately five kilo meters, it is The Nyonin-michi, the Women’s Pilgrimage Route. On...

“In things and materials are wishes of the sender and the maker.” By no means a belief, some Japanese people think so even without a word. And this idea manifests the beauty of Japanese cuisine or the beauty of many Japanese crafts. Because the core of this idea corresponds to purity, and the purity must be transformed into the beauty. I will try to depict it comprehensively and visibly so as that you can catch the mood of it during your travels in Japan, so I chose the case of how to wrap a gift. In western society when people give a gift to another person, they wrap it in decorative paper with a ribbon. Of course In Japan people do the same as birthday gifts or X’mas gifts as well. However if a gift is for a significant celebration like a marriage, how to wrap a gift turns to the traditional Japanese method rigidly.   The picture above depicts promising gifts from the parents of a groom to the parents of a bride. It’s difficult for you to see it directly, but you can see a...