On Temples and Shrines

By Scott—Our last night in Japan, and we are on a mountain called Koya, or “Koya-san,” staying at a seven hundred year-old temple. Our room is beautiful, with sliding- door walls painted with scenes of ancient Japan, a tatami floor, gorgeous carved-wood screens above the doors, and, in one corner, a small television. Our room looks out onto a Zen-style (although the temple is not Zen, but Shingon, or “esoteric” as the hosts here refer to it) raked rock garden. It is cold up here, but there are electric heaters. We just finished dinner, eaten communally with the other guests, most of them German tonight. The food is special “monk food,” prepared without meat, onions, or garlic, and was actually very good. Even Tor liked it quite a bit. Quite a contrast to last night’s dinner. Tonight there was tofu several different ways, beans that tasted like Boston baked, cold tempura vegetables, rice noodles, rice, several kinds of pickled vegetables, some odd spongy tofu, a pot of hot sukiyaki-like stuff on top of sterno, and then some apple slices and mystery-flavored jello for dessert. At the end of the dinner a tiny 90-year old woman came into the small hall and squatted on a cushion and, with a microphone, told us her story and Koya’s story—at length. She grew up on the mountain, then somehow was sent to Tokyo, before the war, and chose to study English, instead of “domestics,” which was what she was urged to study. Then just before the war she was criticized for having studied the “enemy” language. Later, and I forget why, her English came in handy—she did some translation for the Japanese navy?—and she was praised for having studied English. Not sure how the Germans tonight felt her going on at some length about her English studies. She eventually married the former chief priest of this temple, and it has stayed in the family. She was very sweet, really, but seemed not to have much sense of just how long she was going on, and people were getting visibly impatient, worrying about how to blow out their sterno, or, in Tor’s case, suppressing giggles. She told the story of the monk who went to China and came back to found Shingon in Japan. And of the “implement” that he threw—either all the way from China, or from the boat that he was coming back on—at the coast of Japan in order to determine where it was that he was going to establish his monastery. The very same implement, supposedly, is kept in one of the sanctums up the road. There are 53 temples in this area. There were once up to 2,000, though they were quite small. Just the big ones, apparently, have survived. I’ve been impressed in Japan by the apparent wealth of shrines and temples. They can be very big landholders, and seem to have a steady stream of devotees throwing coins into their offering boxes. Our room tonight is by far the most expensive we’ve had in Japan—nearly twice as much as we paid for two hotel rooms, total, in Tokyo (though we did get a relative bargain there). This corresponds to what the Zen monastery I’ve stayed in in California charges—it’s not cheap. Anyway, religion and big business—what’s new?