Otagi Nenbutsu-ji

Kyoto is supposed to have something like 2000 shrines and temples. I don't doubt this number, but I will say that I got burned out on temples and shrines a few days ago. Given that I'm not Buddhist or Shinto, these shrines and temples hold basically no meaning for me other than a cool building. Sometimes you get to see monks or other cool stuff, but you can't usually take photos inside, so that sort of makes them slightly less appealing and distinguishing. They all sort of look the same in the end, if you'll pardon what might be some cultural insensitivity.

Despite this feeling, I had seen a shrine in Wikitravel that they highly recommended and said that it was left out of most guidebooks, but very much worth the trip. It was in Arashiyama, which may or may not still be in Kyoto city, but was very much suburban. There is also a Monkey Park in Arashiyama where you can feed monkeys, so the trip to the area seemed full of promise. The monkeys were a secondary objective since we had even less of an idea where they were in Arashiyama.

We set out on the train and arrived with no problems at Arashiyama station. It was then that we realized that despite the temples in the area and the touristy things, the usual visitors to these places are Japanese. Thus we found no English maps or directions at the station. We did find a map with pictures of different places. One of the pictures looked sort of like where we wanted to go, so we decided to start walking towards that one. There were other temples on the way and we figured that they would make good resting points. We had read on Wikitravel that you could get to this shrine by the #62 or #72 bus, but we didn't quite know where to catch said buses.

Shortly after setting out from the train station, the first temple came into view. We were pretty happy to see that as we had learned from other tourist maps, was pretty small. The distances were manageable and this particular map may have actually had a north arrow. (In other parts of Kyoto we had found maps, tourist maps mind you, that were not north oriented. They were very confusing until we realized that for some reason north was actually towards the bottom of the map).

The first temples proved to be pretty nice. The Buddha statue there was like 600 years old or older. They discovered 50 years ago that the statue had fake organs inside made of silk. We walked around the grounds a bit, saw some more typical temple sights and continued on our way.

While the map we had was scaled oddly, it was at least accurate and we were able to navigate pretty well. We eventually found the shrine pictured on the map and went in. As it turns out, it was not the shrine we were looking for. It was interesting, but after giving it a brief once over, we decided to keep looking for the other shrine so we asked the people at the entrance where the other shrine was. Fortunately for us, it was nearby.

Walking up the road, we came to a fork. This fork had been unexpected so we picked left. We walked a little ways up the road, realized we didn't see any taxis heading up the road, so rather than walk farther we turned around. We then took the right fork, which did have taxis, indicating that there was something actually worth heading towards.

At long last, we reached Otagi Nenbutsu-ji and it was worth the trip. There are 1200 carved statues made between 1981 and 1991. They are all different interpretations of what the founder of Buddhism looks like. They are also, all waist high and basically caricatures. Here are some highlights: