Places to Find (Shelby)

Two weekends ago, October 13 and 14, I met with Furukawa-sensei in Kyoto. After we went to various places for those two days, Furukawa-sensei sent us on our way to find somewhere we hadn’t been yet. There are no shortage of places to visit in Kyoto-- places for tourists, history buffs, or just places you can happen upon by chance. For me, I wasn’t thinking about going to a well-known place that people are likely to know or can easily look up. While those places are important and often nice places to visit, I opted to take another route in finding a place to go, one that I preferred to be on the way back to Hirakata City. Thus, I took to Google Maps to decide for me, and I chose a temple at random to find and visit.

My decision took me to Tobakaido station. From what I saw of the town and the size of the station, the town is likely small and relatively unknown to tourists. I saw few people there and only two foreigners. That being said, from the station, it took roughly 3-5 minutes to walk to the temple I had chosen. Based on what I saw of the town, I wasn’t expecting a large temple, but what I found was even more out of the realm of what I expected; in fact, I almost walked right past it. It was right in between two housing complexes, with one stone post and a wall that you would expect to see at a temple. While I can’t read what was on the stone post, I’m assuming it had something to do with the temple.

Post by the temple entrance

The temple wasn’t really a temple at all-- it was a small space in between the houses around it, where a small, orange altar had been set up. That was all. There were no people, but there were bikes, likely belonging to the people who lived in the houses whose front doors were right next to the small altar. I could tell that it was visited at least kind of frequently, as there were cups that I guessed were offerings on the altar.

Temple gate

I wouldn’t say that I was disappointed in my choice of actions, but I was very surprised that such a small temple would show up on Google Maps. I know, just from going from my house to school, that there are small places like that everywhere in Japan that you can walk past a hundred times before you realize it’s a shrine. I assumed that it was probably just a neighborhood temple.