Ise Shima

Due to diligently working too much in summer, I took two days off in lieu and went down South with a friend to look at some old Japanese stuff. Hokkaido is very pretty and the food is amazing, but what it offers in natural things, it lacks in artificial ones; that is, since the island was settled relatively late in the history of Japan, it does not have the ancient glory of places like Kyoto or Nara. The architecture is very functional, meaning that most houses look like shoe boxes and the people around here most likely to be associated with ancient culture are the native Ainu, not the Japanese. In return we get innumerable national parks and enjoy more space than the people in Honshu, however, it's nice to get out every once in a while.

We flew into Nagoya airport, which was built on an artificial island made out of rubbish - that's how little space they have in Honshu. To get off it we took the fairy and then a train to a town called Matsuzaka, and then Ise, where my friend's friend lives. He was kind enough to host us for a full four nights.

I'd always wanted to go on a trip to Ise, because it is the real spiritual centre of Japan. Ise grand shrine supposedly is the most important shrine in all of Shinto as it is dedicated to the sun goddess Amaterasu Omikami and thus the origin of the Japanese people who, according to legend, descended from her. The shrine consists of an inner (naiku) and an outer (geku) shrine, the former of which is dedicated to Amaterasu, whereas the latter one is dedicated to the god of food, clothing, agriculture etc. It is recommended to worship the outer one first and then the inner.

The shrines are the main reasons to come to Ise city, which seemed pretty empty of people for such a reasonably-sized town. As foreigners, we even got a few stares, comments and questions wandering around the downtown area. Apparently the place doesn't get as many non-Japanese tourists as I would have thought...

The main roads leading up to the shrine are lined with wooden lanterns that are lit up at night and are very easthetically pleasing:

Ise Jingu itself is really a shrine complex in the middle of a forest. This is the entrance to the geku:

Indeed the forest around geku is home to some of the most magnificent trees I've ever seen. Some of the cypresses supposedly are over a thousand years old and overgrow everything while birds are singing in the forest, which is a rare sound to hear in Japan. I guess this is one of the things that set Shinto apart from Japanese Buddhism. While the justly famous Japanese Zen gardens, for example, are made up of natural elements, nothing is left to chance, everything must be ordered and in its place. Their aesthetic is very calculated and it seems like nature is often made to stand in for something else. In gardens around Shinto shrines, however, it is nature itself that is worshiped. You will find ropes or paper strips placed on trees and stones to signal the presence of a kami (deity) or simply a torii (gate, like the one above) to demarcate a place as sacred.

The main shrines in both geku and naiku are not accessible to the public. Some makeshift altar has been set up for people to pray at, but it is not the actual one; it is not even in the actual building. You can get a glance of the shrine building from behind a fence, but it is forbidden to take photographs, as the place is too sacred. This is the fence around geku:

As you can see, the roof and torii are very basic, made out of wood and overgrown with moss; you will only find a few golden decorations. Indeed, Ise shrine is one of the only ones almost completely uninfluenced by Chinese architecture. Many newer shrine buildings can hardly be distinguished from Chinese Buddhist temples, but Ise shrine actually offers a good example of original Japanese architecture. Keeping in mind what I have said above, the naturalness of Ise shrine adds to the sense of awe evoked by the forest. Even though the main shrine is ritually torn down and rebuilt every 20 years (you can see the construction ground next to it), it seems to belong more to nature than to the human world, or at least its architects have taken care to make it appear so.
Here's the entrance to the inner shrine. It supposedly houses the Sacred Mirror (one of the insignia of the Japanese emperor)

At the inner shrine we were also able to observe something pretty strange: a few people doing an o-mairi. An o-mairi is a kind of ritual "pilgrimage" performed on the shrine grounds. You pay the shrine a certain sum of money and are then taken round in a circle by a priest. You can also do it yourself if you like. Seeing this ritual wouldn't seem too special if it hadn't been Ise shrine. At least I didn't know you were able to enter the grounds and the sight of some well-dressed people being escorted around the premises by a fully robed priest in front of all the tourists had an almost surreal feel to it. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take pictures.


Leaving the shrine grounds, one is immediately catapulted back into the real world. The place was swarming with tourists. Were they were hiding during the evening? I have no idea... O-harai machi, the area around the Inner Shrine is made up of some fantastic wooden buildings, some of which date back to the Edo period (1603-1868) - if only you could see them properly for all the tourists shopping in and around them for souvenirs and local specialties.

Having done the same, we hopped on a bus going to Toba, which is actually a quite popular resort area among the locals. However, we were there to see one of the most-photographed spots in all of Japan: the wedded rocks (Meoto Iwa). They are simply two rocks joined in matrimony by a very thick rope. The rope is ceremonially replaced every year in a big festival.
I must admit my expectations of the place had been pretty high. I'd imagined it to be a peaceful shore with the waves gently crashing against the rocks and the seagulls screaming and the sunset etcetc. but obviously nothing could live up to that, so the entrance to the peaceful shore had to be the biggest concrete souvenir shop complex known to mankind, obviously. The rocks themselves were covered in tourists and also a lot smaller than I would have imagined them, but I still found them really pretty.

Not only the rocks themselves, but also the whole stretch of coast is quite picturesque. Interestingly the viewing platform was located on the grounds of a shrine dedicated to something to do with frogs. There were frog statues, frog fountains, frog charms etc. I should read up on that some day...

On our way back the clouds that had covered the sky all day lifted a little bit and I could get some peaceful, idyllic, candy-cottonish shots after all: