I decided to have a relaxing, in-town day today, but when I tried to go to the art museum, I found that it was closed, so instead I went wandering until I found a small shrine with an extensive graveyard.



This post was going to be about how I prefer the small shrines-- how even when I went to Kyoto, my favorite place wasn't built out of silver or gold but stone and wood and was out in the hills, far from the tour groups. I was going to write about how, if I were to pretend that tendency was about a desire to have a genuine Japanese experience, I'd be guilty of pretension at worst and misinterpretation at best. Bigger shrines are generally bigger for a reason: they typically house more important deities, so there's no shame in sticking to them so long as you go to your hometown shrine to spruce up grandma's grave at the proper times. Moreover, tourism is a part of the genuine Japanese experience. Not a weekend goes by without me seeing a few tour groups marching through Ashikaga. I think the ubiquity of tourism and tour groups among the Japanese has something to do with the tradition of learning by watching (as when I did the tea ceremony, we learned to do the movements by first watching the master). I think I was even going to contrast this with some more gnostic impulse in myself (and, generally, in Americans if you believe Harold Bloom).

But then, in the graveyard, I found a leaf-covered trail with geology poking through, and this became a post about how beautiful Ashikaga is.




It has been a good place to heal. I hope I'm healed enough for things to work with midnightglobe.