Japanese temples generally have tiled roofs, with ornamental tiles of various sizes and meanings sprinkled liberally throughout. For example, the demon-face tile seen the other day on this post:

In Japanese these ornamental tiles are called onigawara (鬼 瓦) — literally “demon tile” — though the word is used for any complex decorative tile, with or without a demon. The English word “gargoyle” is often used for these; it's not really the right word, but it's evocative of the same concept, and I can't think of anything better.

Earlier in the summer I had a fantastic opportunity (more on that later) to get a private tour of the Minobe family workshop, which has been entrusted to make these tiles for generations. Subject over the years to weather, earthquakes, war, and vandalism, the tiles end up lasting only a few hundred years, so much of their current work is recreating and replacing the ornamental tiles that earlier generations of the family had created for famous Kyoto temples.

The huge decorative tiles seen above are still called onigawara (demon tiles), even though they don't have demons or ogres or devils, or anything else like that. Here's the detail from the one on the right, of what looks to me like a phoenix...

Side note; “Ebisu” is the namesake for one of Japan's oldest beers, archaically transliterated on the label as “Yebisu” but pronounced the same. To facilitate distribution of this beer, the company made a train station near the brewery in 1901 and named it after the beer. The Ebisu neighborhood of Tokyo then grew up around it. So the station and the neighborhood are named after a beer, but the beer is named after an ancient deity.

In front of the kirin is a title with a simple flower. There were also things like birds and fish, and all had meanings. I might be remembering this incorrectly, but having a bird on your roof (or in your garden) would mean people would flock there in larger numbers, and having a fish means that people would return time and again. The point is that there's meaning to all of this that goes back centuries; it's not just decoration.

This workshop is not normally open to the public, but can now be visited as part of an exclusive tour by Tour du Lac Biwa (“Lake Biwa Tours”), a new company devoted to English-language off-the-beaten-path tours in Shiga, near Kyoto.

Prior to them opening their tour business to the public, I attended a test tour for free, as a guinea pig. I had a great time, and contributed my photos to their cause, so you'll see some of my photos (and photos of me) on the tour page.

(I've taken a number of their tours as a test guinea pig, but couldn't write about it on my blog until they started business officially. Now that they have, I can start to write about some of the wonderful experiences I had.)

The huge demon tile above is the one that I whimsically labeled as the “Japanese Gargoyle of Email Destruction” in my post about lost email the other day:

It's interesting to compare the eyes on this one to some of the others. With most of these demon-face tiles, the eyes are bulged out like the huge awaiting-the-kiln unit above, or like that with deep indentations for the pupils. But with this one right above, the eyes are empty tubes all the way in, which means that they'll turn into deep holes of black once mounted. (In the photo above, what looks like pupils are really holes in the mounting bracket at the back of the tile, which would normally not be lit when actually mounted. The lining up to appear as pupils in this photo was quite intentional.)

Mr. Minobe gave a demonstration of how they work, which will become part two of this writeup.

Continued here...