Today we decided to take another trip out of Fukuoka and see the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine. It was a thirty minute train ride to Dazaifu where the shrine takes up enough mountainside acreage to include an amusement park and a mall-size modern museum. The street from the train station to the shrine gate was lined with shops and restaurants.
Visiting shrines in Japan is a popular pastime, and the Dazaifu Tenmangu Shrine was crowded with families and school kids all there because basically they wanted some kind of good fortune to come their way.
Bell ropes were pulled, statues in shrines were bowed to, hands were clapped. Offerings were made by depositing coins in slotted wooden boxes. Statues were being stroked.
Amulets were purchased from stalls across from the shrine. I It was like being at a Shinto bazaar, everywhere we looked people were taking pictures of each other as deals were being made with deities.
In search of a more peaceful setting, we left the jostling spiritual bargain hunters down by the large Tenmangu Shrine and hiked up banner decorated steps to the small hilltop Tenkai Inari Shrine.
Then we headed past some large ponds towards the enormous hump-backed glass carapace of the Kyushu National Museum.
First the escalators, then the moving track going through a tunnel of colorfully changing light.
There was a Haniwa exhibit which we skipped because there were plenty of terra cotta Haniwa funerary statues (from the third century AD) in the museum’s permanent display cases.
I was just thankful that I got to get a pic of a ten-foot nio statue. Nios stand guard at the front of a temple’s gates.
I could do a whole post on the gigantic, gnarled, goblin-faced Japanese trees that we’ve seen at some of the shrines. This one was outside the main shrine in Dazaifu.
And what would a shrine be without an amusement park?
That Nio guy is really ripped. I would not try to get past him.