Commercialised Shrine: After mountain top experience it was time to descend and go for lunch. After lunch we decided to take a look at a nearby Shinto shrine (called Yasaka-jinja, "jinja" = shrine) which was at the foot of the mountain. Even though it was a working day there were still a lot people there going for their New Year's blessing.1
The first thing I noticed just how commercialised the Shrine was compared to the Buddhist temple. In the photo above you can see all of the vending machines that were in one area of the shrine complex. Well the commercialisation got a lot worse than that, sure there were shops selling the usual Shinto charms, but they were also selling things which had nothing to do with religion.
Japanese people don't really considered Shinto a religion (even though it has a whole collection of gods, known as "kami"), but rather as part of their culture2. So I guess it should have been no surprise to me that the shrine was very "worldly", but I did not know this before I came to Japan.
You might notice the white paper tied to ropes in photo above, when a Japanese person receives their fortune for the year from the fortune teller they take the fortune to the shrine and tie it to these ropes.3
