Okuni Shrine

Rice

Today's snack:

Maccha(Green tea) Rice cracker and Fish-shaped sweets(fish is not contained)



Daifuku(whipped-cream and caramel covered with ricecake)



My grandpa is threshing the rice here at home.

Japanese Rakkyo!

My grandma brought boxes of strawberries! She said our neighbours gave them to her. These are in wooden boxes. It's nice to see strawberries packed in wooden boxes rather than plastic ones. This gonna be my today's snack! Ha Ha!



Next, I helped her to make Rakkyo pickles. Rakkyo(Allium chinense) is a Japanese traditional side-dish pickles. So I'm making the pickle syrop here.



My grandma is pouring the syrop into the Rakkyo jar.



She said we should wait for a year to eat them. So see you next year.^^

Visit a Japanese shrine

Today, I visited the nearest Japanese shrine and this is the gate. This gate is called Torii which is to separate the holy place and secular world.



Go through the gate, there you can see all those trees are planted to make a natural arch.



The contrast of the light and shadow; isn't that beautiful?



This is the shrine. It's quite small and nobody is there. Only once a year, villegers who belong to this shrine come together and have a festival to celebrate the harvest of the year.



There is another rice straw rope. Those ropes are very important for Shintoism. The ropes are there to seald the holy shrine and protect from evil spirits.　The box you can see in front of the entrance is the box for prayers to offer some money to the gods/spirits. The offering price is not fixed, but people usually put coins, but not notes.



Here's a water place. People use here to purify themselves before praying.

Japanese snacks^^

A rice cracker with soy-source flavour, and a sweet ricecake skewer.
These are very traditional.