I would prepare your lunch each day and fill your metal lunchbox with rice, cooked vegetables or cooked meat or sometimes eggs (scrambled with soy sauce and sugar, called tamago yaki). The lunchbox was first wrapped in a square cloth like a big handkerchief, then it was fitted neatly into a small canvas bag with a strap.
In the summer the square cloth was made of broadcloth, in winter flannel to help insulate the food. You carried the lunchbox all through kindergarten and chopsticks also. Starting in first grade, you got your lunch at school.
You carried his books in a satchel made of fine leather called randoseru. This was strapped to the back like a backpack. When children start first grade it is one thing that parents must buy. The children carry randoseru until third or fourth grade. Then they use a book satchel with a handle.
RELIGION IN JAPAN
Most Japanese participate in both Shinto and Buddhist rites and there is little sense of any contradiction in incorporating elements of both religions into their lives. Shinto is usually invoked in rites of passage, and in blessings conferred on aspects of ordinary life, such as new houses, and new ventures. A child is taken to a Shinto shrine at ages 3, 5, and 7; weddings can be shinto (or Christian, even for non-Christians who simply like the style of a Òwhite dressÓ wedding); a new fishing boat shop or a new car might be blessed by a Shinto priest.
Funerals, or memorial services, are Buddhist, as Buddhism has to so with the after life and the world beyond this. At set intervals, memorial services are held at the temples, complete with catered obento (formal lunch boxes), and the family and friends gather to remember the dead.
Tablets and photographs of the recently deceased are also kept in a small butsudan or family altar in the home, but in the same home there might also be a small Shinto shelf with places for daily offerings and perhaps some small statues of the fox god, a popular Shinto Deity. Modern apartments may not have either, but usually the ancestral home will keep tablets of the ancestors (at least those within the memory of the living).
Shinto shrines, and Buddhist temples, are often multipurpose places, as not only do they serve religious functions but they are also community centers. For example, many have buildings on their grounds used for senior citizen centers or day care centers, and other local community activities take place on the grounds, such as the annual sale of morning glory plants, or festivals and meetings to discuss various local issues. The use of such sites is quite secular, and does not imply that priests are local civic leaders.
SHINTO
Shinto is a truly indigenous Japanese religion. It is actually a composite development of local rites and practises, based in early (perhaps 500 BC) fertility cults, burial customs, and hunting rituals. Later agricultural communities produced agrarian rituals to ensure crops. Local animistic practises also added to the complexity of Shinto.
The Meiji Period represented the full institutionalization of Shinto, which as the "Ancient Way" became the official state religion. A system of national shrines was supported, and Shinto was taught in schools. During the 1930s and the war period, Shinto became militantly nationalistic, but was disestablished as the state religion after defeat.
Shinto rituals and thought focus on sacred space and sacred time. Shrines are ritualized spaces where marking of boundaries with rope, pebbles, trees, and pillars organizes practise. Sometimes shrines are found deep in forests, in small clearings in sacred groves. They are also associated at sources of rivers, on mountains, and near fields, reminding us of the relationship to agriculture.
In terms of time, the relationship to ancestral deities and origins of all kinds are invoked. Offerings often consist of foods, and there are also rites of propitiation, including special rites now for the opening of a new shop, or for cars and trucks and boats, not unlike the Catholic blessing of the fishing fleet in Gloucester, Massachusetts. But chief among ritual uses are rites of purification, including protection from dangerous elements, such as disease, death and destruction, and restoration of a proper relationship with the environment.
The notion of the kami, or divine spirit is central. All things and people have kami in them, including natural elements, such as water, trees, the sun -- and traditionallly the Emperor was also seen as a kami, as are we all, but an exalted one.
KAMAKURA
Kamakura is just to the southwest of Tokyo, a peaceful town with many temples and historic sites. In the 12th century, Minamoto no Yoritomo established there the political center of the Kamakura shogunate, and from then to 1333 Kamakura was the capital of the country. The Great Buddha dominates the town, but many Zen Buddhist temples are also attractions.
