Kyoto

Kyoto is a fascinating place with many Buddhist Temples, Shinto Shrines, Gardens, and other cultural activities. Nara and Kyoto hold much of Japan's ancient culture where history is kept through museums, temples, ect. With our group we went to the following locations.

Fushimi Inari Shrine

This Shinto Shrine is known as the Business Shrine. Many torii's (the orange gates in the pictures below) have been donated, by Japanese businesses, to the Fushimi Inari shrine. This shrine is the head shrine for the 30,000 Inari-sha shrines nationwide. This location on Mt. Inari has been a place of worship for the guardian god of businesses, prosperity, and family safety for hundreds of years. Throughout a trail are thousands of these torii's to represent good fortune towards the businesses that donated them. Over 10,000 of these gates at this location. Other shrines have these torri's to represent an entrance for a holy site (the shrine).

Kinkakuji Temple

Also known as "The Golden Pavilion", this cultural site is as beautiful as the pictures. This was truly a beautiful site to see! The amounts of people indicated the importance of this place. The large amount of people had an effect on the site, but I have recently grown familiar with dense amounts of people in one location while visiting Japan. There has been many occasions when I have been in a "full" elevator, bus, or train and yet still more people pile in. During my stay in Japan I have learned that in America we like to have lots of space... here in Japan we like to use every inch of space. The Japanese culture is very focused on efficiency and maximization while American culture tends to be more focused on comfortably and sometimes low utilization.