Continuing from yesterday’s post, today I have many more pictures of lion dogs from shrines further afield than Kitakyushu. First we’ll visit Dazaifu in central Fukuoka, then we’ll go to Miyazaki on Kyushu’s southwest coast, and we’ll finish our expedition on an island in Hiroshima. Because there are so many pictures, you won’t have to do much reading.
As this is the second in a four-part series, you’ll probably want to read Part 1 if you haven’t already done so.
Are they lions or dogs? Why is one open-mouthed and the other closed-mouthed? What are they doing at shrines all over Japan? Well, I’ve found some of the answers. Secrets of the Japanese shishi—also known as koma-inu —will be revealed at last! The creatures are, in fact, lions. Or dogs. Or lion-dogs. One explanation of the mouths is that the open mouth is to scare away evil spirits, and the closed mouth is to keep in good spirits.
For those of you with short attention spans, the rest of this post is mostly just further details about the quadrupeds in question, a little bit of background about why I chose today’s topic. Plus many many pictures.
I’m trying to keep these site maintenance posts interesting by including something completely unrelated. Is it working?
Last Friday and Saturday we had the annual Culture Festival at Yahata High School, so today I had a day off for having gone to work on the weekend. How did I spend my day? Well, if any of you were trying to read my blog, you may have figured out that I was fiddling with the code.
Here’s another short photo post, so that I can attempt to catch up on my sleep. Miyajima, an island near Hiroshima in the Seto Inland Sea, is famous for its “floating” torii.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned cycling through southeastern Fukuoka. Tonight I’m a bit pressed for time so I’m only posting one photo and what I foresee as very little commentary.
Yatsurugi Shrine is in Miyata Town (宮田町), east of Kitakyushu. I ended up there completely by accident, on the tail end of a bike trip on May 5, 2005. I didn’t have a very good map with me, and had followed a couple of signs pointing towards a hiking area, and then got distracted by a series of torii. What follows are some photos in and around the shrine grounds. There are a couple of standard photos of the shrine, and then a lot of pictures of the pink flowers and greenery that took me completely by surprise.
A while back I wrote about Ogopogo. A few days later, I encountered something Ogopogo-like while out and about. Around the same time—on April 14th—I wrote about my assorted Iron Chef encounters. And the following week Lia told me that she’d seen a poster of the original Iron Chef Japanese, Rokusaburo Michiba, in the window of our neighbourhood 7-11 store.
At the time, I didn’t have a chance to take a photo and by the time I did, the poster was gone. Luckily, the poster reappeared and I was able to hurriedly take some pictures of it on the morning of May 3rd as we began a journey to Hikosan in southeast Fukuoka.
Here’s another one from archives of the Department of Questionable Signs. Not a road sign, though. And not my misinterpretation, either.
Here’s another short post about another misinterpreted street sign. Those of you waiting for the next installment of Amy in Japanland will have to wait as she’s disappeared into the wilds of Korea.
I had a completely split-up, interrupt-driven day, filled with schedule changes and miscommunications. But you probably don’t want to hear about it, or the fabulous time I had with Lia this evening, preparing our UK visa applications. Plus, I don’t want to relive the experiences by writing about them further. Consider yourselves lucky that I’ve instead chosen to start posting photos of my interpretations of road signs.