[Spot] Tsurugaoka Hachimangu Shrine
[Visitor] 1 woman from Cameroon and her brother-in-law
[Attendant] 1 KSGG member
[Language] English
In front of a pair of komainu (stone guardian animals), the visitors got convinced at my explanation that the meaning of “ah” and “un” is similar to that of alpha and omega in Greek which represents the beginning and ending of the whole universe respectively. They said that they could figure out the image of Masako, the passionate wife of Yoritomo. She made the Gen-Pei Pond with three islets for the Genji family and four islets for the Heishi family to strongly imply that the Japanese word for san(three) means birth and shi(four) means death. At that very moment, the children’s ceremony for Shichi-go-san(a festival for children for three, five or seven years old) was being held in the precincts of Hachimangu Shrine, where the visitors were fascinated with the children dressed up in their kimonos and asked their parents to take a picture with them. I thought it would become a good memory for them. They admired that the Great Buddha at Kotokuin Temple was reconstructed though it was destroyed in several natural disasters.