Today is Advent Sunday. Every year I give up drinking the booze "at home" during Advent and Lent, and since I'm home all day today, today is indeed a booze-free day!
And that's a good thing, since I woke up with a hangover after partying last night away with a bunch of colleagues and others at a dinner and karaoke party in the private quarters of Kokuzenji Temple.
Kokuzenji is a Nichiren Temple and is approached via a fine two-storeyed gate that survived the atomic bomb and is registered as an "Important Cultural Property."
Nichiren Buddhism focusses on the idea of a "single practice" that anybody can perform, that is, the chanting of the "daimoku" (the "sacred title" of the Lotus sutra), to achieve good karma, and the chant goes like this:
“Namu Myōhō renge kyō”
which can be translated as,
"I take refuge in the Lotus of the Wonderful Law."
We passed through the gate and veered left to enter the private residence of the temple owners where we had been invited to a dinner party. The party was held for a couple of Takarazuka performers who are good friends of the temple matriarch who was herself a former Takarazuka performer and still puts on occasional shows well into her eighties.
Takarazuka is an all female musical theatre troupe that is immensely popular in Japan. See this Wikipedia page for more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takarazuka_Revue
After dinner, with the booze freely flowing, the doors to a side room were slid open to reveal a karaoke system and there we are, some of the part-time teaching staff of a Hiroshima English language school, partying the evening away on the tatami mats of Kokuzenji temple.
Kanpai!
David Hurley
#InspiredFocus
[//]:# (!worldmappin 34.40310 lat 132.48115 long The imposing gate of Kokuzenji (a Nichiren temple) survived the A-bomb and is designated as an "important national treasure." d3scr)