Ueno Park - The Pond Shrine

This is going to be a tricky post to write, for a couple of reasons. The big one is that, for some reason, there were practically no real visitor's plaques around these places. You know the basic ones that tell you what things are, who built them, why they were built, etc.? For whatever reason, the temples and shrines around Tokyo really didn't have those. I'm not sure why, but they didn't.

So, a lot of the information is info I found after the fact. TripAdvisor helps with that a lot, but the rest of this might be tricky. It involves research. (Which I really like, but it's still harder than just writing a post from memory.)

My understanding of Tokyo is this: it used to be a whole collection of different cities that just all grew into each other. I think the various districts of Tokyo used to be those different cities. But, I am not sure. It may just be that the guides I talked with didn't know the word for district and used city instead. I'm not sure.

Anyway, Ueno is one of those districts. It has a lot of beautiful shrines and a single large park with a beautiful pond right in the middle.

Here's the shrine, from the pond:

This shrine is called the Benten-do Temple. The islet in the middle of the pond is artificial, built in the 1600's. The first temple enshrined Benzaiten, goddess of the river, but it, along with many things in Japan, was destroyed in WWII. The current shrine holds Benten, the eight-armed goddess of, among other things, eloquence and poetry. (All that comes from a piece of paper I got at a different shrine.)

One of the things you can do at a Buddhist or Shinto shrine (apparently there's very little difference between the two) is get your fortune told. There is a box of sticks with numbers on them. You shake the box politely (the guide used that word) and then draw out the first stick you can find. You remember the number, but put the stick back. Then you go to a series of drawers, and open the drawer with the number of the stick you pulled out. Inside that drawer is your fortune. 

If you like your fortune, you take it home. But if you don't like it, you tie it to the strings outside the shrine:

That way, you leave your bad fortune behind at the shrine. 

Then there were these slabs of wood. If I remember correctly, they were prayers:

I think I remember reading one that said, "We have everything we need. All we ask for is peace."

Outside the shrine was a giant pot for incense. Worshipers believe that if you wave the smoke from the incense onto the part of your body that was afflicted with something, it will be cured.

Once you visited the incense burner, you would go up some stairs to pray at the shrine. 

Here's what the inside looks like:

There's a certain ritual when you pray here. First, you ring the bell to get the local deity's attention.* Then you throw a coin into the coffer under that giant lantern (it does not matter how big or small). Then you clap twice,** bow, make your wish, clap once, and leave. 

The tour guides used the phrase "make your wish", by the way. That wasn't my term. And... hm. I know I've been using the word "worship", but that doesn't really seem to fit, does it? I always think of worship as something you do to show respect, and not something you do to get a wish granted. I need to think of a better word.

Fortunately, I have lots of opportunities, because there are many shrines upcoming! 

*I can't lie, when I heard that, I immediately thought of this. 

**The Shinto and Buddhist shrines have different rules about the clapping. If I remember correctly, you clap twice at a Shinto temple, but you don't clap here at a Buddhist temple. But, I may be remembering that wrong.