You all seemed to like the previous pinmapple post I did, so let's do another.

I took a walk from a small shrine near the library where I often work all the way to one of the bigger shrines in the city. Most of the photos are from the bigger shrine, so I'll put this post on the map there.

We'll start with this nice panorama shot of the big shrine, called Iga Hachimangu (伊賀八幡宮), to give this post a nice thumbnail.

This is facing in towards the lotus pond of the shrine. The lotus blossoms aren't quite ready yet, but they are almost there. Anyway, let's jump back though to the start of my walk.

I started at a tiny shrine called Hakusan Shrine (白山神社).

There really isn't much here, but it is a good place to sit. When I am working at the library, I sometimes walk here on my break to sit and eat lunch or a snack in the peaceful environment.

That first building from the entrance is where you wash your hands, called the temizuya. Shinto is very big on cleanliness.

From there you see the torii gate and the main shrine beyond it, guarded by two komainu, those lion-dogs.

I've never seen anyone play at that small playground back there, but I suppose people must use it. I used to take my kids here every now and then.

From here, I walked over to Iga Hachimangu. I didn't take any photos of the walk there. So let's jump there.

This large torii gate marks the entrance. It's starting to look a little worse for wear. They repaint it every few years. Actually the wood is looking like it might be in bad shape too. They also rebuild torii gates every now and again, so this one might be coming due.

Anyway, through the gate and up to the shinkyo bridge over to the shrine.

Those are cherry trees around the bridge. In spring this area looks really impressive. I think in the past five years on Hive I've probably shared this same shot but with cherry blossoms blooming. They rebuilt this bridge about five years ago and it improved it a lot at that time. It's nice to stand at the top and just watch the river.

You already saw the pano, but here it is again, after I cross over the bridge. Hopefully it looks alright. It's a huge pano, made from 30 photos and about 30gb after processing. I shrink it down quite a lot to get Ecency to accept it.

I actually took this as I was leaving an hour or so later, so the sky looks a little different, but we'll cheat and insert it now.

Moving in, we can see the lotus blossoms aren't quite there yet. A few more days to a week maybe. A few are past there already, like that one that has seemed to already lost it's blossoms. But most aren't fully bloomed yet. If I have time I'll try to come here again and see them.

Walking around the left side of the pond, we turn back to look at the entrance.

And the other way to look at another gate to the shrine.

Yeah, big shrines can have a lot of gates. This big one is called a rōmon gate or tower gate. It was originally a Buddhist thing, but is now used at both Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. Let's go in! Hmm... and take a photo looking back the other way.

And this is pretty much it for the rōmon gate. It looks huge, but there is actually very little space in them, just enough to walk through.

In front of us we can see another temizuya. I stopped by and washed my hands.

Then we have the main shrine, where the shrine kami lives. I stopped and prayed and donated ¥50 yen, which is thought to be lucky because of the hole in the middle.

There is much more to this shrine, but I wasn't in the mood to document every detail, just take shots as I walked around. I stayed in the shrine for awhile, just enjoying the peacefulness of the area. No one else was there so it was very quiet. The temperature was hot, but not as hot as it's been the past few weeks, so that was nice.

When I left I passed by this tiny Inari shrine that is across the street, called Kyokuni Inari Shrine (教國稲荷神社). This is about all there is to it:

Iga Hachimangu is a shrine for Hachiman, the god of war. Hachiman was popular with the ruling samurai class, perhaps for obvious reasons. Many Hachiman shrines are pretty big, but Inari is far more popular with the common people of Japan. You can very commonly see businessmen or students praying at Inari shrines like Kyokuni for success at work or school. You can always tell them because they usually have multiple torii gates and fox statues instead of komainu statues. If you look closely at that photo, through the multiple torii gate you can see the fox guardians.

Anyway, and so ends my trip. I walked around some more then went and shot that pano that I used at the top of this post. That was made from 30 photos, as I mentioned above. Back in the day it would have taken me an hour or two trying to stitch all those photos together, but nowadays Photoshop can spit those out in seconds. Ain't technology great?

❦

David LaSpina is an American photographer and translator lost in Japan, trying to capture the beauty of this country one photo at a time and searching for the perfect haiku.