Shrined Out

Miyajima is a small island in Hiroshima bay. It takes about half an hour to reach from city center, including a ten minute ferry ride. When we arrive it is raining, an abrupt change from the sunny, hot weather that has defined my trip so far. Fall has finally come to Japan, and it's not kidding around.

My friends, Hannah, a Brit, Hunter, an Australian, and another Ozzie whose name escapes me, and I are all determined to see the island fully. All four of us will be going somewhere else tomorrow, and this is our last chance to see the island – possibly ever. Such is the way of travel; rain or shine, you go out sightseeing because you don't want to have to say that you've missed it.

Which is how we ended up on top of Miyajima's Mount Misen in a rainstorm. Mt Misen is about 530 meters high, but it took us nearly two hours to hike the 3 kilometer path up the mountain in the rain. Our reward for being soaked to the bone was the lack of any other tourists as crazy as we are. For the first time ever in Japan, I feel like I'm seeing some place few people get to.

The jungle of Miyajima is sub-tropical; giant ferns and dense underbrush make it seem like a dinosaur might pop out at any moment. The last two hundred meters of the path is a vertical slog up wet stone staircases that make your calves burn with delicious fire. At the top, we are rewarded with a view of...

Nothing.

We're in the middle of a cloud. Grayscale fills our vision, and the furthest we can see is maybe ten meters or so. I'd be disappointed if the hike wasn't so good. Still, we are soaked, and I can feel the water squishing in my shoes, which is not a good thing for hiking. We resolve to make the trip back via a gondola system that leads down the mountain.

One of the best and worst things about Japan, at least for a history/religion major, is that there are shrines or temples literally everywhere. Our group had heard that there was a shrine at the top of the mountain, but none of us were really interested in exploring it. Ben likes to call this being "shrined out," which is as good a term as any.

Being "shrined out" involves looking at the exterior of the six hundredth shrine or temple that you've seen, determining that you don't want to pay the five hundred yen to go inside and see your one hundred and fifty seventh giant Buddha, or in the case of a Shinto shrine, a screen hiding the rest of the shrine from view, and just forgoing taking pictures because the last time you looked at your photos, you have approximately a million photos of shrines whose names you don't remember.

I got shrined out about two weeks into Japan. I'm hoping it changes when I get to another country, but as of this writing I'm still not down to see any more unless they really are important.

The temple on top of Miyajima is important, or at the very least interesting. It consists of three buildings. A main temple area, a shrine, and what can only be called a smokehouse. The smokehouse is really a shell for what's inside it, which is a fire that has burned for more one thousand three hundred years. It is supposedly the campfire of one of the monks who brought Buddhism to Japan in the late 600s. Let me repeat that: this fire is older than the European discovery of my home continent. Older than the Magna Carta. Older than the Crusades. Older than some written languages. It predates the Dark Ages. It is the stuff myths and legends are made of.

Maybe I'm not all shrined out.

-Doug