June 21 - Kamakura, Fujisawa

As the weekend began we got a late start to the morning and headed to Kamakura. Kamakura was Japan’s capital between 1185-1333. Here we got our first experience in Japanese Buddhist temples.

We went to the Tsurugaoka Hachiman-gu Shrine, Hase-Dera, and saw the “Great Buddha”, Diabutsu.

After we went to a few of these, they are very similar. You purify yourselves by washing off by ladling water onto your hands and such.

Then you breath in some of the incense for good luck, etc.

It is the year of the rat, so there were places where people wrote their wishes on little cards and attached them to this board. Later they are all burned and your wishes are supposed to come true.

You could also get your fortune told by these people who don’t like their pictures to be taken. You take the little slip of paper and tie it to a board where this will help the fortune to come true.

There are also many shrines here that people pray towards. I’m not sure of all what’s supposed to be going on there, but what I observed was people would come up, throw money into this thing that looks like my grill at home. Then they would clap their hands to “wake up” the God/s. Then they would pray for whatever. Each shrine usually had some sort of specific purpose either for long life, wealth, love, lost children, etc. It was interesting to watch, however it made us a little uncomfortable with all the idol “worship”.

We also walked around Fujisawa but didn’t do too much there other than eat. We went a little astray from the Japanese norm and had Fish/Chips at a pub.