Hatsumode, the first shrine visit in a calendar year – another Abandoned Kansai tradition…
Up to 3.5 million visitors on three days some shrines can have. That’s a recipe for disaster! This year apparently plans were made to prolong the traditional year end winter break (yes, Japan has a traditional shutdown around New Year’s Day every year, even without a pandemic! Much to the dismay of millions of salarymen who have to spend time with their alienated families and equally as many housewives who can’t go luxury purse shopping for two or three days in a row… lucky are the few who are able to visit their parents in the middle of nowhere and feel like a child again for a couple of days), but of course those plans were scrapped quickly, because… Japan. It is dominated by the almighty Yen. Advertising everywhere, shopping opportunities everywhere. Only a money spending citizen is a good citizen!
I remember being in the middle of that millions of visitors per shrine hatsumode nightmare twice in my life – once when I met friends (who have several kids now, which means they moved on to the next phase of their predetermined life in Japan…) and once when my sister came to visit. Ever since then I prefer abandoned shrines, especially NOT at the beginning of winter.
Hence the Half-Abandoned Shrine in this edition of “Hatsumode on Abandoned Kansai”. This one I visited in autumn of 2019 with a Japanese buddy of mine. It’s located in the countryside, next to fields, a forest and a fishing pond. Upon arrival my buddy took on a conversation with two elderly hobby farmers. One of them started to guide us around and soon we ended up in front of a cage with four young wild boars – the boar piglets were clearly not happy about the situation they were in, and they would have been even less if they’d understood any of the conversation the farmer and my friend had; I understood only a little more, but it was enough – “nabe” and laughter… (Nabe is a Japanese hot pot dish, especially popular on cold nights!)
The farmer also told us that we weren’t the first people to look for the shrine, which apparently is popular amongst Osakan university students getting drunk there in summer, as it is widely considered a ghost spot – and when I look at the pathetic suits I have to deal with on a daily basis, I can imagine that getting drunk at a “ghost spot” in the countryside in their early 20s really is the most exciting thing they’ve ever done in their lives… Anyway, we moved deeper into the forest, along an annoyingly muddy path, and finally hit the shrine area, which indeed looked half-abandoned – decaying and falling apart, with a small abandoned hut; a stark contrast to the fresh cut flowers somebody left there recently. Fortunately the photos turned out to be much more interesting than the location really was – and since it was technically only half abandoned I could reveal the exact location… but then again, I’m not another one of those shitty guide books, so let’s move on to the next location – or look back at the *Shiga Shrine*, which I thought was much more interesting in every regard!
Happy, happy, happy 2021 everyone!
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Thanks for sharing this. I’m curious about the piglets – it looked like they were in a trap?
Yeah, those are typical traps you can find everywhere when hiking in the Japanese countryside. I doubt that all four were caught at the same time, so I assume that it was their temporary home before becoming nabe…
cool :). happy 2021 to you too, lets all hope that it will suck abit less than 2020 did lol