I can’t believe I never posted anything about Yashima-ji on this blog. It’s time to change this. What about, right now?   So, Yashima-ji is located on the Yashima plateau, in the north-east of Takamatsu, and it is the 84th temple of the Shikoku Pilgrimage. It is said to

  In the Okayama Prefecture countryside, near the town of Sōja, there is a quite interesting temple, interesting mostly due to its pagoda. It is called Bitchū Kokubunji.     Before going any further, a few words of history and etymology. Bitchū (備中) is the former name of the western

  When you think about Japanese temples, you certainly think about buildings and places that are several hundreds years old if not more. And to be honest, this is that I think about too. However, the truth is that not every temple is that old. Some (or at least their

  So, a few days ago I told you that I was done with telling you about New Year in Japan until next year. Well, I was wrong. I had forgotten about Dondo Yaki. What is this? Dondo Yaki? Well, it’s actually quite simple. See, for New Year’s, houses are

  As you most likely already know, when you do the Shikoku Pilgrimage, or simply when you visit its temples with the appropriate “notebook” you can receive a very nice calligraphy of the temple’s “official signature” in exchange of 300 Yen (you can see some of them in the pages

  Back in October 2010, I bought a Daruma in Takamatsu. For the few of you who don’t know what a Daruma is,  it’s a Japanese paper doll representing  Bodhidharma. It’s main purpose is to symbolize wishes that people make. Usually, when you buy a Daruma, it tends to look like

  While I mention Kōbō-Daishi quite often, I never talked in detail about him. And as this post will mostly be about the ceremony I attended last June in Zentsūji for his birthday, maybe now is a good time to tell you a little bit about his life. I obviously won’t write a

  Last June, on the 14th to be exact, I went to Zentsūji for the third time (but visited it only for the second time, remember, the first time around we didn’t stop more than a few minutes). This time we went for a very particular reason, as it was Kōbō-Daishi’s birthday. More

  I already briefly mentioned Zentsūji before, but now is time to tell you a bit more about it. Zentsūji is a Buddhist temple located in the town of the same name in the Kagawa Prefecture. It has several particularities, one of them being that it is the first Buddhist

  After watching the Naruto Whirlpools, we drove to the town of Naruto to visit Ryōzen-ji (霊山寺), the first of the 88 Shikoku Pilgrimage temples. You may already know this, but when you decide to walk (or bike or drive) the Shikoku Pilgrimage, you just don’t start anywhere. Well, you

  We stopped in Zentsūji for just a few minutes on our way from Zenigata to Konpirasan, but it was worth it. The temple is one of the 88 temples from the Shikoku Pilgrimage and definitely must go back and spend more time there on a future trip to Takamatsu. (Notes:

    In my Flying Dragons series, today, I want to introduce you to Unryū-zu, the Dragon among clouds, another mural from Ryōan-ji although I’m not sure this one is available to the public (I didn’t see it). This painting is attributed to Min Chō (1352-1431) a Zen monk who also was a

  Unfortunately, I don’t have that much to tell you about Negoro-ji apart from the fact that it’s the 82th Temple of the Shikoku Pilgrimage, that it is located in a forest on top of a small mountain from which the view of Sakaide, Takamatsu and parts of the Seto

  As you may already know, Shikoku is famous among other things for its Pilgrimage of 88 Buddhist Temples. I’m sure that I will talk about it into more details another day as today I am going to focus on only one of those temples; temple number 80, Sanuki Kokubunji