Pleasantly Surprised by Dismay at Kamakura-gu, or a Chip Off the Sake Cup

Weather, Rene, Shinagawa, Artistic

Shinagawa took us to Kamakura Saturday to buy fabric for those purses she's going to teach us how to make next month. She was looking for a distraction and four crazy gaijin ladies filled the bill.

Shinagawa's only child - a daughter - was tackling the college entrance examination in Tokyo while we were rambling around Kamakura.  College entrance examinations in Japan are something like SAT and ACT exams in the United States but much more elaborate.  They cover more subjects than language and mathematics and take two days to complete.  As I understand it, the examination results determine whether a student will go on to college or straight into the workforce.

With their child's future hanging in the balance, Japanese parents flock to shrines and temples to pray for good results.  This strikes me as a lovely tradition and I was both honored and thrilled to share this experience with my friend.  Whether I'm lighting a candle in a cathedral or tossing a coin in a wooden box, praying for a child's success feels good to me.  I'm suddenly feeling nostalgic for all those rosaries we offered the night before high school football games.

Because I'm something of a nerd - gasp - I did a little research on this tradition the night before we went to Kamakura and concluded that Shinagawa would be taking us to Egara Tenjin-sha because that shrine is dedicated to the deity of scholarship, Sugawara Michizane, a deity with whom I've become quite conversant under Ishii's tutelage. But - another gasp - I was wrong. Shinagawa took us to Kamakura-gu instead.

A bit dismayed at the amount of time wasted researching the wrong shrine, I wondered (aloud, as is my wont) why we were here and not there. Shinagawa's friend, a former classmate, is a priest and she developed a fondness for Kamakura-gu when he was assigned to this shrine. Shinagawa, a mistress of the sidelong glance and blessed with a pair of wonderfully expressive eyes, doesn't need to plumb the depths of her impressive English vocabulary list to communicate humor.  She lets me know somehow that her friend was the Boy Most Unlikely to Become a Priest.  We share a giggle.  Now I can't stop thinking about the boys in my class most unlikely to become what they eventually became.  Apparently their mothers were offering rosaries when I wasn't looking.

The grounds of Kamakura-gu offered plenty of distractions. The Chinese dragon machine at left is but one example. I did not insert the required 200 Yen in the coin slot but the dragon started dancing the minute I took his picture. Maybe since I don't know what caused it, the performance seemed especially magical and delightful.

Near the entrance to the shrine Shinagawa dropped a few coins into a wooden box and handed each of us a flat clay sake cup. One of us called the cup a souvenir and stuck it in her pocket but Shinagawa was having none of that. She told us to pray for relief from a physical ailment before hurling the cup at one of three large rocks lined up along the fence in what looked at first to be a bed of gravel but turned out to be pieces of broken sake cups.

We threw those cups as hard as we could but none of our cups shattered. The best we could manage was a few chips. Who is responsible for all those shards littering the ground at the base of the rocks? If Major League Baseball does not know about this phenomenon, someone needs to tell them.

At the rear of the shrine we found a statue of a samurai, which I suppose represents Prince Morinaga (1308-1335) since the reason Emperor Meiji built this shrine in 1869 was to honor that prince's spirit.

Prince Morinaga is believed to be the third child of Emperor Godaigo. (The information regarding his date of birth and birth order is understandably a bit sketchy since Emperor Godaigo, a incredibly randy man, had many court ladies and fathered 36 children in all.) To make a long story as short as I can, the power to rule Japan was temporarily restored to the imperial court in the form of Emperor Godaigo when the Kamakura Shogunate (Hojo clan) crumbled in 1333. But the person who helped restore power to the imperial court, Ashikaga Takauji, soon betrayed the emperor by capturing Prince Morinaga and placing him under house arrest at a Zen temple where Kamakura-gu now stands. Prince Morinaga was older than 24 but younger than 27 when this happened.

The Hojo clan did not give up their hegemony without a fight. Ashikaga's younger brother, Tadayoshi, was defending Kamakura when the Hojos attacked in 1335. Realizing he could not protect the prince from the Hojos, Tadayoshi decided to kill the prince himself. I suppose he thought he was doing the prince a favor.

For reasons that escape me, visitors to the shrine nowadays rub this statue and then pray for relief.  They rub his head to ward off headaches, his chest to ward off heart attacks, and one recent visitor rubbed Prince Morinaga's legs to ward off amputation.

Some visitors write their prayers on the backs of little clay statues which ring the statue like battalions. I would like to do that the next time I visit Kamakura-gu.