Hachiman is a Shinto god, popular as a protector of warriors. There are Hachiman shrines dedicated to this deity throughout Japan.
*SHINTO
Corky writes:
"Shinto is a truly indigenous Japanese religion. It is actually a composite development of local rites and practices, based in early (perhaps 500 BC) fertility cults, burial customs, and hunting rituals. Later agricultural communities produced agrarian rituals to ensure crops. Local animistic practices 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 practice. 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 traditionally the Emperor was also seen as a kami, as are we all, but an exalted one."
*EMA
People sometimes burn these plaques after making the wish. The idea is that the rising smoke takes the wish to heaven.
*CONFUCIAN
Philosophy based on the writings of Confucius (551-479 BC)
*FORTUNES
Usually people tie their fortunes to a tree branch near the entrance to a shrine, but this shrine has a wooden rack instead for this purpose.
You buy the fortune, which can cost from fifty cents to three dollars.
There are four or five levels of fortunes. The best one is daikichi (dai = big, kichi = luck or fortune).
If you get a daikichi fortune, you keep it; if you get one of the other levels, you tie it to the tree branch by the shrine's entrance.
*CALLIGRAPHY
*KANJI
*JAPANESE KANJI
Calligraphy in Japan means writing with a brush and ink. There are three different types of letters. Hiragana & katakana, both developed by the Japanese, are phonetic based--the letters represent the sounds. The third, kanji, originated in China and uses characters ideographically to express meaning. Because of the refinement of the materials and the range of graphic interpretation of the scripts, calligraphy has developed in Japan as an important traditional art form.
*3-5-7 CELEBRATION
Children are taken to a Shinto shrine for a special celebration at the ages of 3, 5, and 7.
