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Diane Williamson's avatar

These photos of small towns would be cities here in Australia .

Tim Bunting - Kiwi Yamabushi's avatar

Same as NZ! Yamagata prefecture in the last year or so went under 1,000,000 population. Or, a fifth of NZ’s population :p for example!

Francis Turner's avatar

So a Buddhist monk's followers built a Shinto shrine at the spot where he was told he was a Bodhisattva ?

That's ... different.

The castle part sounds quite like a place I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before in Eastern Shimane: Gassan Todajo (月山富田城), which was an extremely defensible castle and home of the Amako clan until the Mori came along, besieged the place and eventually conquered it near the end of the Sengoku period

Tim Bunting - Kiwi Yamabushi's avatar

Yeah, I imagine Tendo Jinja was not a Jinja until Meiji. So it would have been all Buddhist until they tried to remove Buddhism from Japan, at which point the people said ‘nah, we’re Shinto now’. That or it really is Shinbutsu Shugo, fused Shinto and Buddhism (I know you know this stuff, more for the uninitiated).

Next week’s article will have more on the military history. I think you’ll find a lot of similarities! This castle was taken over, if you can say that, by the Oda clan, of Oda Nobunaga fame, but they were poor! So couldn’t really do much.