The fall-foliage season is mostly over in Kyoto. During this season I re-discovered and explored some wonderful areas within walking distance from my house.

It started when a friend suggested that I visit a temple nearby, sending a map link, so I headed off towards it.

The map link brought me to one of the entrances to a big graveyard behind the Konkaikomyou-ji Temple, an area with a lot of visual richness. I went in to explore.

Despite the English word “gravestone”, there are no bodies buried here, just little fragments of bone in a cavity under the stone, as described in “Kotsuiri — Placing of the Bones”.

They're often beautiful and photogenic, especially the older ones.

But this was the fall-foliage season, so I was first drawn to some colorful leaves near the northern edge of the graveyard, and I looked over the fence to see this:

I couldn't see much, but the partially-visible roof made me guess that it was the back garden of a temple.

Anyway, I continued to explore the paths in the graveyard, and at the end of one came to a larger affair:

The wabi-sabi is strong here. Its size suggests importance, and parts of it are still in good shape, but other parts are leaning precariously, and there are few right angles left anymore. But the fact that it's still here means, I think, that someone's still paying for its space on temple grounds.

Reading the information on these stones is an art, one of which I have only the most basic abilities. Here's the side that has the date:

Across the top are two characters, 「松」meaning “pine” and 「淳」, which my dictionary says means “pure”. I don't know whether these are headings for the dates that come underneath them, or whether they are a single word (and if so, whether it's 「松淳」「淳松」), so I'm off to a bad start.

But, down the right side is clearly a date that reads 「明治三十八年八月十日歿」, which means “Died Aug 10, Meiji 38”. The 38th year of the Meiji era is 1905.

The writing is somewhat stylized, as you can tell by comparing the font seen in the sentence above with that seen on the stone. In particular, I'd not recognize the middle character as 「年」outside the context of an obvious date.

Down the left side is also clearly a date, though which date I'm not so sure. It looks to be 「昭和四年十月廾一日歿」, which seems to me to mean “Died October 21st, Showa 4” (year 4 of the Showa era was 1929). But again, the character that looks to be 「年」doesn't look quite right, so I might be missing something.

Across from this large grave was a more modern, and more colorful one that had clearly been tended to recently:

But, across from it next to the bigger one was an older one still:

I started on a mission to see how old of a stone I could find. Soon I came across a date with an era name I'd never seen:

I had to look up the era name, 「享保」, so pulled up Wikipedia's List of Japanese era names, and was excited to find that the Kyoho era went from 1716 to 1736, so this year-19 date equates to 1734. It's older than America.

The date was clear to me, but the two small characters 甲 and 寅 after the year number were a mystery. Later that evening, Manseki-san told me it was from the Chinese sexagenary cycle, a sixty-year cycle that seems to be in the same class as the 12-year cycle we sometimes hear spoken of with phrases like “year of the horse”. Indeed, doing the calculations for 1734, we find it equates to year 51 of that cycle, which is denoted by those two characters included on the stone.

The current era is in year 29, and the previous era ran for 63 years, so it's easy to forget that sometimes the eras lasted just a few years (they last only as long as their emperor). In the past 150 years there have been only four eras, but in the 150 years prior to that there were 21. This part of Kyoto used to be on the fringe, and has been used for burial rituals for over a thousand years, so with well over a hundred era names that might apply to things I find, I have to look up any but the most recent. It can be a bit exciting as I scroll backwards in time and still don't find a match.

This seems to have a mini life story. From what I can tell, he was born on Sep 18th in the year 文久2 (1862), joined families (by marriage, I assume), and died on May 8 of 昭和17 (1942), which would put him just shy of his 80th birthday. But it seems to say “81 years old” at one point. I'm probably just misunderstanding something, but I wonder whether they simply lost track of the years. In counting from the birth year (文久2) to the death year (昭和17) one has to know the details of six eras (文久 covered three years, 元治 just two, 慶応 covered 4, then 明治 and 大正 covered 43 and 15, respectively, and then they were still in 昭和).

Now I suppose they have an app for computing time spans across eras, but I can't imagine how they kept it straight back then. 🙂

The three old stones above were clearly part of a set, and carried the dates, left to right, of 延寳2 (1674), 享保12 (1727), and 享保20 (1735).

At first I couldn't figure out that leftmost date because I couldn't find any reference to「延寳」on the Wikipedia eras page. I didn't realize that it was the oldest stone I'd so far found.

It turns out, I learned that night thanks to Manseki's help, that「寳」is the old way to write「宝」so the Wikipedia list had「延宝」. I've since updated the Wikipedia page to include the original way it was written, and added a photo of the gravestone above (showing the date as originally written) to the Wikipedia page for that Era.

The stones along the hedge in the photo above are actually at the edge of a steep enbankment over a stret. Here's the view from the street, with the same hedge on the right:

It doesn't look like it'll be too long before those stones come crashing down into the street. )-:

I finally started moving farther afield from where my friend's map link had pointed me, moving up a hill and behind other temples...

Wandering back toward my starting point to complete a loop that enclosed the temple I'd been peeking at over fences, I came back to within a few steps of where I was pointed to on the map, and found the entrance to the temple:

So this is where my friend had intended me to go. Now I understand. It's amazing.

I posted a few from here in “A Few Views of Kyoto’s Spectacular Eisho-in Temple”, though I took those photos the morning after today's walk, when I had the place mostly to myself.

And the wigglegram that I posted the other day came from here, on yet another morning visit a few days after this one.

Many people, when they walk through the gate into the garden area, immediately take a photo of the buddha...

To be continued...