Warabekan Toy and Childrens Song Museum

The Warabekan is a huge museum located in Tottori City devoted exclusively to childrens toys as well as childrens songs and nursery rhymes.

There are thousands of toys, both traditional and modern, on display from all over the world.

As well as the displays there is aslo a big room where kids can play with toys and make toys.

Equally fascinating is the section on childrens songs which covers the period from the Meiji era up until the present, including songs from famous childrens TV shows.

In an earlier post you can find some of the childrens songs.....

The White Rabbit of Inaba

The year of the rabbit is coming to a close, so time to tell the story of the white rabbit of Inaba.

Hakuto Shrine is located near the beach a little east of Tottori City. The old province name for this area was Inaba. The kami of Hakuto Shrine is Hakutojin, the kami name for the white rabbit of Inaba.

The rabbit was on one of the Okis islands, about 50kms offshore (now a part of Shimane). He wished to travel to the mainland so he a devised a plan that involved tricking some crocodiles. Incidentally, the story is often told nowadays with sharks instead of crocodiles, but the original story quite clearly does not involve sharks.

The rabbit suggested to the crocodiles that the rabbit clan was much bigger than the crocodile clan, and to prove it he would need to count all the members of the crocodile clan so he suggested that they all line up and as he stepped on them one at a time he would be able to count them and come to a definitive answer. The crocodiles agreed and so the rabbit began to make his way to the mainland using the crocodiles as stepping stones.

The rabbit was just about to the beach when he rather foolishly decided to shout out "Hah! tricked you..." upon which the last crocodile lunged for the rabbit and while not able to kill it managed to strip the fur from the rabbit. The story now intersects with another legend, that of Okuninushi, his eighty brothers, and Princess Yakami.

Okuninushis brothers, the Yasogami, were coming along the beach on the way to see Princess Yakami to see which of them she would choose as a husband. The Yasogami were quite cruel, and seeing the poor suffering rabbit they suggested that it would find relief by bathing in seawater and then standing in the wind. Of course this just caused more pain and suffering for the hapless rabbit. Following along in the rear carrying the baggage for his brothers was Okuninushi. He told the rabbit to bathe is freshwater and then roll in sedge pollen, which he did and was then healed. In gratitude the rabbit told Okuninushi that even though he was just the bagggage carrier he would be the one chosen by Princess Yakami.

Myths, like people, travel great distances. There seem to be several possible sources of this myth. In Indonesia there is a famous story involving a small deer that tricks crocodiles into lining up across a river on the pretense of being counted but really so the deer can cross the river. Also, the Koguryo and Puyo peoples of what is now northern Korea had foundation legends that involve a hero crossing water on the backs of turtles that seem to be derived from older stories from further south in China that had crocodiles fulfilling the same role. There are several more myths from Koguryo that mirror Japanese myths, and all along the Japan Sea coast are shrines dedicated to a variety of kami who came here from what is now Korea.

Art of Manidera

I have often heard it said that if you've been to one temple, you've been to them all, but as time goes on I have found quite the opposite to be true, every temple (and indeed shrine) is quite unique.

 

One of the intriguing aspects of temples for me is the art. The statues, carvings, paintings, and sometimes even masks.

 

japanese buddhism includes a massive array of a sometimes bewildering number of buddhas, deities, and other figures. Sometimes a single piece of art can be quite exquisite, but for me it is more interesting searching for and finding original expressions of the same figure or buddha,

 

here are just a few of the artpieces at Manidera, a mountain temple near Tottori City.

 

Two previous posts on Manidera can be found here

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Cosplay

Well, this is something you probably thought you would never see on this blog, and it is something that surprises me too. Cosplay!

Last week I went up to Enchoen, a huge Chinese garden in Tottori, and when I walked in I was surprised to see lots of kids dressed up in cosplay. Apparently I had stumbled in to the 11th Annual Pan-Asian Cosplay Competition.

There were kids from China, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand, and of course Japan. They all had tons of high-end camera equipment and spent their time posing and shooting....

I dont read manga nor watch anime, so I have absolutely no idea who any of these characters are...

Nio of Manidera

The Tendai mountain temple near Tottori City, Manidera, has a wonderful Niomon and pair of Nio.

 

Anyone who follows this blog knows I have a thing for Nio, lots of photos of them can be found here

I suspect this pair who created and installed when the local daimyo rebuilt the temple in the early 17th century.

 

What I find intriguing is the way in which the effects of age and weather have stripped away layers of paint to reveal the wood beneath......

 

The earlier post on Manidera is here

Manidera

Manidera is a mountain temple on Maniyama not far from Tottori City and the Tottori sand dunes.

Established on the top of the mountain in 834, it was later rebuilt a little lower.

 

After parking the car there is still a lot of steps to climb. The temple is one of 4 "special" temples of the Chugoku 33 Kannon Pilgrimage, though it is not numbered. So really there are 37.

 

Hideyoshi destroyed the temple in the late 16th Century as part of his campaign against the local Mori Clan. Later when Tottori was established as a castle town the Daimyo rebuilt Manidera as the Kimon of the castle to protect the castle from the spiritually dangerous NE direction.

 

The Temple belongs to the Tendai sect, and the main enshrined deities are Senju Kannon, the thousand-armed Kannon, and Taishakuten, originally a Hindu deity that once incorporated into Buddhism is known as the commander of the Shitenno, the four heavenly kings.

 

The water flowing around the base of the statue of Kannon in the courtyard is known as healing water and people come from far and wide for it.

Whereas women were forbidden from entering many temples, ie Enryakuji on Mt Hie or Koyasan, women were allowed here so was particularly popular.

 

Partway u the stairway to the temple you pass through an impressive Niomon gate with guardian statues.

The art & offerings of Tanegaike Benzaiten

Part of my interest in visiting shrines is to see the various forms of art and offerings that are on display. At the Tanegaike Benzaiten Shrine near the Tottori sand dunes snakes/serpents are the theme due to their association with Benzaiten.

Benzaiten is sometimes found in shrines, sometimes in temples, and like much of japanese religion historically she crosses the boundaries between both, so its not unusual to see a buddhist statue within a shrine, or vice versa.

Like the nearby sand art displays, these representations of the dragon of the legend are made out of sand.

Because snakes like eggs, fresh eggs are left as offerings in front of the shrines. I have also seen this at Omiwa, where the legend is of Okuninushi appearing in the form of a snake.

While plastic flowers are not uncommon, real ones are still used.....

Tanegaike Dragon

Tanegaike Dragon

The Bentengu is a shrine to Benzaiten on the shore of Tanegaike, a small lake close to the sand dunes in Tottori. Though only a quarter of a square kilometer in area, the lake is actually the deepest in the Chugoku region, with a depth of 17 meters. Deep in the lake lives a serpent.

Once upon a time a local rich man employed many local villagers as servants. One young woman, who of course was beautiful, by the name of Otane was employed as a maid. Otane was known as a particularly kind and generous young lady and every day she would give people persimmons.

One young man was curious about where she was getting the persimmons from so he secretly followed her. She went down to the shore of the lake and transformed into a serpent and then swam out to a small island in the middle of the lake and picked persimmons from a tree there.

Because she saw the young man watching her she was unable to turn back into her human form and so stayed as a serpent living in the lake.

An old lady built a small shrine to honor Otane, and this grew into the Benzaiten shrine. Benzaiten, originally the Hindu goddess Saraswati, has strong associations with water and therefore also serpents. She is one of the seven lucky gods of japan and has both "shinto" and Buddhist manifestations.

Japanese Childrens songs

These 3 short clips of traditional Japanese children's songs are from the Warabekan, a toy and childrens song museum in Tottori City.

The childrens song section of the museum I found particularly interesting and thought the way they displayed these songs were good.

Unfortunately I have no information about these particular songs, so if any readers know what they are aor anything about them please post a comment.

East Well Shrine

When we came out of the Nagashibina Doll Museum in Mochigase I spied a little splash of autumn colors across the valley and suspected it might be a shrine. I was right.

The name might be Higashii Shrine, or it might be Toi Shrine, so to be on the safe side I use its name translated into English, East Well Shrine.

The main kamis are Susano and Myoken Daimyojin. Daimyojin means "great Shining Deity" and is an appelation applied to many kami, eg Kasuga Daimyojin, Inari Daimyojin, etc. Myoken, like many gods and kami in Japan has a long and complex history, but is a primarily known in its esoteric buddhist form as the god of the Pole Star and Big Dipper. With the seperation of buddhas and kami in the Meiji era most places enshrining Myoken changed its name to Ame no Minakanushi, so the use of the name Myoken here may have been a return to the old name in the postwar period.

There were a couple of secondary shrines within the grounds including this one to Inari.

The priests house was empty and abandoned, and behind it a small untended garden that would have looked good in its prime.

Africa! The sand sculptures in Tottori

Just behind the sand dunes in Tottori is the Sand Art Museum that opened in 2006 and has just finished its fourth exhibition on the theme of Africa.

Artists from Europe, North America, and Australia created large scale sculptures and tableau. The exhibition ran from April 2010 until January 2011, so I suspect the are now working on the fifth exhibition.

Most of the sculptures are in the open air, so I suspect there must be some kind of resin or epoxy mixed with the sand to allow them to survive in the weather.

One huge tableau though was exhibited under several canvas structures.

 

Each exhibition has gotten larger and involved more invited artists, so it will be interesting to see what the next theme will be.