Narrow Road To The Deep North 49

Honsha shrine has almost 2500 sculptures, some from Chinese legends, (including the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove), a crane that became the trademark for Japan Airlines, and another on the door, that consumes dreams and nightmares. Trust in dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity. What began in China as a shy mythical chimera with an elephant’s trunk, rhinoceros eyes, an ox tail, and tiger paws, offering protection against pestilence and evil, evolved into a Japanese nightmare-devouring Baku tapir, a symbol of peace.
Robyn and I didn’t get to see the interior three halls of the Haiden Oratory, neither the one reserved for the Imperial family, nor the one for the shogun, not the central one for conducting ceremonies. We missed the mosaics, and the imported diamonds in the eyes of the phoenix. Instead we passed the of Hidari Jingorō’s other Tōshōgū carved masterpiece, the Nemurineko ‘Sleeping Cat,’ his sculpture of a sparrow on the backside of catnapping feline. The bird would be eaten if the cat was awake but they co-exist because, thanks to Ieyasu, the nation-wide chaos was over and peace had returned.
There was only one more gate, the Sakashitamon, the one with the crane on the transom and the peony and arabesque pattern carved on the wainscot, the one that only the Shogun was allowed to enter.
Beyond were 200 stone steps rising sharply, each big and heavy enough in order to survive the ice needles of severe winter. They lead to a peaceful flagstone path that carried us through an original grove of thirteen thousand dignified standing cedars (planted over a twenty year period during the 1600s), up and around a view of the sunlight lifting the rooftops of the shrines below, and the snow piles at the top, yielding reluctantly to April.

                   ‘Unawares, all grew old:
                    Even the mountain’s cypresses, standing like spears,
                    Grew moss thick at their feet.’
                                                                         Kamo Taruhito