The First Shrine
After lunch on the first day, Sue and Andy took me to the little Takayama Inari shrine on the other side of Shinagawa station, at the bottom of a block of shops and hemmed in by shops. It was moved there from the hill beyond when the area was re-developed. I knew how important both Buddhist and Shinto shrines are in Japanese society. A colleague of Sue’s who’d been to Sengaku-ji a few months ago to get a new blessing for his girlfriend’s car might had been told by his boss to take a long lunch-break to go back there to give thanks, after hearing that morning that she’d been in an accident but was unhurt. It doesn’t matter whether the blessing was the most important thing to his faith or just a bit of fun, why take a chance by not saying thanks?
When it wasn’t clear whether Andy’s visit would be approved, it was completely normal that Sue’s Japanese colleagues had showed her how to make a petition at the shrine: it’s something that people do even if they’re not devout followers. When Andy mislaid his passport, Sue went out to renew the petition. Did the petition work? Against all the seeming odds eighteen hours ago, we were here, so, now, we went to give thanks. The etiquette for Andy was to use the dipper in the water to wash his left had, then his right, then pour some water into his hand and rinse his mouth, before finally letting the water run down the handle of the dipper, leaving it pure for the next person. Since I’d have had to splash water all over the place I sat unobtrusively in the camera-bag. I’m sure that the spirits understood, and it was good practice for the next day. Andy then went to the railings, clapped three times and threw some money into the box. I wondered why he’d been splitting banknotes all the time that morning: over the next week I was to learn some very devious strategies for keeping a store of 5-yen coins.