Temple Ruins, Hiraizumi, Japan
At the Motsu-Ji site in the World Heritage town of Hiraizumi, Japan, most of the huge temple complex built in the 8th Century has been destroyed by wars, fires, and earthquakes over the years.
At the Motsu-Ji site in the World Heritage town of Hiraizumi, Japan, most of the huge temple complex built in the 8th Century has been destroyed by wars, fires, and earthquakes over the years.
The most famous temple in Japan, the gilded Temple of the Golden Pavilion of Kyoto, was intentionally burned to the ground in 1950 by a deranged monk.
Seeing the stark record of the atomic bomb destruction in Hiroshima and Nagasaki makes us reflect yet again on the horror of war.
We took sort of an unplanned side trip to Kagoshima, at the very end of the southern Japanese island of Kyushu, just to see one of the most active volcanoes … Read more
The Itsukushima shrine, a torii arch set into the sea near Hiroshima, and its attendant Noh theater stage, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Zenkoji Temple in Nagano offers a variety of religious images best taken in context.
We toured the castle at Matsumoto, which is entirely made out of wood, btw, while we waited for the light to swing around and hit the “good” side of the … Read more
The temples of Nikko, Japan are some of the most ornate in Japan. The Nikko shrines were built by the Tokugawa Shoguns in the17th to 19th Centuries.
We had a notion that Japan was going to be a bit, shall we say, inscrutable. And we were right. There’s something about not having an alphabet so foreigners can … Read more
This Shinto shrine was tucked into a hillside right next to the highway. Nikko is the home to some of the most distinctive Shinto shrines in Japan.