For my wife's birthday, we went to Kyoto. This is part four of that trip, but they are not in any particular order.
We went to the Thousand Torii Gate Shrine in Kyoto. Torii gates are an artifact of the Shinto faith. They are supposed to be portals to the spirit world. I think they only allow spirits to pass back and forth, I don't think that humans are supposed to be able to use them, but I don't know for sure. If I was able to move back and forth from one world to another, it was so fast that I didn't notice (or I'm still there now, who's to say).
The sky is blue, water is wet, and Kyoto has a lot of temples. There are famous temples and not so famous temples, and this is one of the famous ones. That being said, I don't have that much to say about it that I haven't already said about torii gates. Shinto likes the color red. It has torii gates. Now do that 1000 times.
Somebody told me that these statues are there to ward off evil spirits, burglers, and theives. We theorized that the chicken wire is there to keep out the birds so they don't nest or poop on the statues. The statues sit in these little booths. Some, like this one, look like humans, but others look like demons.
There is a path up a mountain that is covered in torii gates.
There are a thousand of them. They are not uniform, they are different sizes, and colors, and ages, and shades of red, with minor details changes between them.
There are small details added to different areas. Lanterns hanging from beams, small stone plinths, statues, etc.
A thousand torii gates of different sizes are hard to photograph in a way that displayes them. Some are larger, so they block others that are further back. Additionally, the path curves, so there's that.
Along the path, there are other shrines. Some are places where you can buy charms, write on the charms, then post the charms for good luck for your wishes. In other places you can light incense and pray. Most of them are built into the hillside and the contours of the mountain.
They also have statues spread around. I don't know if this one is a messenger, or what it is holding in its mouth. They normally look that angry, I don't think that it's actually angry. They also look different from the smart fox spirits. They might just be a different interpretation of the same fox spirit, or maybe something entirely different.
At the top of the mountain, there is more stuff, as one would expect for the end of the shrine. There are lots of what seem like personal shrines, or sponsored shrines. I don't know what the meaning of the shrines are, but there are a lot of them at the top.
There is also the big top-of-the-mountain shrine. By the time I got to it, I just wanted to sit on the steps and rest. I don't say prayers or go through the motions at shrines anyway, so it was more for the hiking experience. It was also kinda of anticlimactic, because the top is the halfway point, you still gotta hike back down.
SarisonZero lives and works in Japan. He has three new fellow students in his Japanese class and is trying not to show off.