We took off the subway train at uzumasa-Tenjingawa Station. , the western terminal of Kyoto Municipal Tozai Subway Line. Walking out of a subway station is always tricky to me. I instantly lost my bearings. My daughter pointed a direction without hesitation. "How do you know?" "We should just follow Sanjo Street." A street sign obviously wrote "Sanjo Street." We walked on out into the sunlight, and headed westward along the street. The street is a 2-lane one, but too narrow to provide substantial sidewalks. We had to either face against cars and busses or push through sightseers who were going back to the station. It took far less than half an hour, however, before I found a bush ahead. It was, as I guessed, Koryu-ji Temple. Koryu-ji Temple belongs to the Shingon sect, was founded in 603, and is the oldest one in Kyoto. Its founder, Hata no Kawakatsu, was a Chinese-Japanese and brought advanced technologies at the time, such as weaving and brewing, to Japan. Uzumasa's "masa," Hata, and, interestingly enough, Chinese Qin Dynasty's "Qin" all share the same Chinese character.
I pushed on to see a famous wooden statue of Bodhisattva, while my daughter kept taking buildings' pictures. Her major is Architecture. The statue seemed to be lamenting the whole world, with wars, hungers, and ….. with his two fingers slightly touching his cheek, but my daughter argued he just looked just too narcissist.
We walked out of the temple into the din and bustle of the street again. None of us, unluckily, had a map, and I led east-north-ward by intuition. After walking for a short time, my daughter insisted to stop. I thought one of the Chinese characters of a tiny shrine's name, Osake-jinja Shrine (literally, Big Wine Shrine) attracted her, but she emphasized that the fact the shrine is dedicated to Qin Shi Huang ( literally; the First Emperor in China, 259 BC-210 BC) interested her. According to a sign at the entrance of the shrine, The emperor's 14th-generation descendant escaped from wars in China, and founded the shrine.
After walking eastward for a some while then, when we found Life Supermarket ahead, we, this time luckily enough, found another bush in the south. We walked a little bit too northward. It was Konoshima-ni-masu-Amateru-mitama-jinja Shrine (commonly known as Kaiko-no-yashiro). The shrine was first recorded on a public document in 701, and is supposed to have been founded earlier by Hatas. It has Kokai-jinja Shrine in it, which enshrines silkworms. Sericulture is supposed to have been brought to Japan by Hata clan. As we approached its main inner shrine, we were overtaken by a girl high school student, who, in front of the main shrine, made two bows and two claps in a very formal way. She even made prayers in front of every and each sub-shrines there. Was she very religious, or deeply in need of gods' helps? Or is it just very common in Uzumasa to make prayers formally, and even a teenager girl follow the custom? I felt a little bit abashed and made a formal prayer after her.
