On our visit to the Sanzen-in Temple in the mountains north of Kyoto a couple of weeks ago, at the highest area that we ventured to (where Anthony got his prize for doing the "sticker rally"), there were racks and racks of little "offering" statues, each representing a donation to the temple.....

Each face of each "wall" has 1,500 statuettes, so there are 12,000 statuettes in these four walls, with more in the background. These were the only "offering" things I noticed, which makes a stark comparison to the Fushimi Inari Shrine, in Kyoto's southern mountains, where everything not nailed [...]

This post follows from Secluded Beach on Ishigaki Island, Part I, about our trip to the beach on our second day of a short trip to Ishigaki Island in the far south of Japan. Part I included this picture looking north from our spot on the beach....

We saw only a few people the whole time we were there, including one guy who walked up the beach toward the outcropping seen above, and just disappeared. I wondered what was over there, so I took a stroll.

When we'd first arrived, I'd seen someone way down the beach playing with some [...]

In last week's post "A Visit to Kyoto's Sanzen-in Temple" (which was followed up by some pretty desktop backgrounds and Part II), I included a photo captioned Contemplation, showing a lady at the edge of a garden-viewing room, viewing one of the temple's gardens.

I never got around to actually entering the garden-viewing room myself, but on the way out of the temple grounds an hour or so later, a small break in an intermediate wall gave a glimpse of the garden and the garden-viewing room from right angles to before, and I took the opportunity to snap another shot.

So, continuing with the story about our recent visit to the Sanzen-in Temple in the Kyoto mountain suburb Ohara on Sunday (which produced the pretty desktop backgrounds I posted yesterday)....

As I said in the first post, it's a mountain temple, and so it has different zones separated by various flights of stairs....

You can see in the background of the picture above the trunks of some cedars disappearing above the lower canopy of maple and other leafy trees. The cedars here were all very tall, and ramrod straight...

The next level included a modern (circa 1989) temple building (one [...]

A few desktop-background pictures from the first half of yesterday's visit to Sanzen-in Temple in Ohara, a mountain suburb of Kyoto, Japan....

Continued here...