Kannonji Temple 27 Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage

 

Kannonji is located in Gotsu Honmachi, the old, original town, slightly upstream from the mouth of the Gonokawa River.

Overlooking the old part of town, it is a Rinzai Zen temple, but can find no other information at all

This was the final stop for day 37 on the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimage, and day 18 on the Iwami Kannon Pilgrimage. This was the last day I walked them both concurrently. From day 38 I will be back to just walking the Chugoku.

The previous post was on the walk along the beach into Gotsu.

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Miscellaneous Namba Architecture

 

After leaving the Osaka Science Museum I headed to the station to head out for an appointment.

Along the way I took these snapshots of various architectural details, as for me, a long time resident of really rural Japan, they were exotic and interesting.....

I am still uncomfortable in the large parts of Osaka that are underground......

None of the photos are of particularly famous or interesting architecture, simply a record of what took my eye as I walked to the station.

The previous post was on the Osaka Science Museum.

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Along the Beach to Gotsu

 

After the temple and shrines in Tsunozu, the next stop is a temple in Gotsu Honmachi and so head off down the small coast road rather than the main road.

When I can I opt to continue along the beach rather than the road....

It's late November and the sea is much more active than usual.

Most of this post will be shots of the wavy sea.....

I pass Majima where I had stopped and explored at the start of the days walk....

The final few photos are not seashots.... peering inside a collapsing wooden garage I found this incredible old American car of some kind..... so much rust that I doubt it could be renovated.....

As I get cose to the mouth of the river a Heron......

And then the final photo, one of the few traditional buildings left in Gotsu. A traditional confectionary-cake-dessert shop..... never actually been inside, though it does garner rave reviews....

The previous post in this series on day 37 of my walk along the Chugoku Kannon Pilgrimge was on a couple of shrines in Tsunozu.

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Konjiji Temple 12 Shikoku Fudo Myoo Pilgrimage

 

Konjiji, temple number 12 on the Shikoku Fudo Myoo Pilgrimage, is a mountaintop temple with a strong Shugendo past.

It is also the okunoin of Dainichiji, the 13th temple on the famous Shikoku 88 Pilgrimage.

Like so many mountain temples associated with Shugendo, Konjiji is said to have been founded by the legendary En no Gyoja in the 7th Century.

More than a century later, Kobo Daishi visited and practised austerities and had a vision of Kongo Zao Gongen and so carved an image of him and placed it in a cave.

Each of the 36 temples on this Fudo pilgrimage has a statue of one of the 36 young acolytes called Doji. The one here is called Harahara Doji.

Susuharae is an old traditional ritual of sweeping away soot, dust, cobwebs etc from under the eaves of shrines and temples  for the new year using a takesao, a long bamboo with straw or leaf "brush" at the end. A short video of it being done ceremonially at Dazaifu Tenmangu in this old post.

The temple fell into disuse but was revived at the end of the 16th century by Hachisuka Iemasu, the Daimyo of Awa Domain. He took the Zao Gongen statue and enshrined it within the castle town but strange things happened so he made a copy and placed the copy back at Konjiji. Strange things continued to happen so he realized the statue need to be returned which is why there are two statues now.

The temple sits at an elevation of 310 meters, and has superb views down on Tokushima and the Yoshino River. I will post more of the views in the next post in the series.

About 500 meters from the main temple is a waterfall used for ascetic training. I suspect that the ladder I passed on the trail up the mountain was one way to get to the falls.

I believe the masks pictured below were carved by a famous Noh mask carver from Shiga.

The first two masks are Tengu, but the third is a Noh mask representation of Fudo Myoo

The previous post was on the way up the mountain to the temple.

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