Remember Gwen Stefani’s Harajuku girls?
Right up the hill from the Harajuku district in Tokyo is the Meiji-jingu Shrine.
Shinto is a set of practices to be carried out in diligence that connects modern day Japan unto its past.
The preservation of the past is an important theme in Japanese culture, and you must wash to gain entry to the shrine.
Handcrafted from Japanese copper and cypress, the construction began in 1915 and was completed in 1921.
Until the mid 1940‘s, this handsome shrine to a deceased Emperor was one of the Kanpei-taisha (官幣大社), in the first rank of Japanese sanctuary.
Then the United States Air Force showed up.
We destroyed about half the city, killed well over 100,000 and the original shrine was lost.
But a fund raising effort by the general public rebuilt a shrine replica in 1958.
The more things change, the more they stay the same in Japan.