Cemeteries

I ended up a a number of cemeteries yesterday and the day before... so here are some pics!

The first one, Adashino Nenbutsuji, is an old buddhist temple. To get to it you have to ride up this little mountain road. 

The temple is full of little stone markers, many of buddhist deities.  High priest Kukai is supposed to have buried a thousand of them on top of the cemetery. 

They add little aprons to some of the statues... im not sure why.

many of the grave stones have thin wooden sheets in front of them. Most of them have places for flowers and incense burning.

People leave stuff on the graves. The blue things are soda cans. Ive also seen sake and other beverages.

More of the little stone things. 

There was one main field like this one, and then many smaller fields of stone statues.

This was in the center of the place. You take an incense stick, and place it under that little hut.

The next pictures are from a newer cemetery. Its called Toribeno. In The Tale of Genji, its where her mother is supposed to have been buried.

The place is massive. I walked for ten minutes or so then checked gps on my phone, and i was only about a third of the way through. It has many different tiers, and runs up the side of a mountain.

Its been a cemetery since the Heian period (9th to 12 ccentury). This was just a cool grave. The stone tablet on the right is a common thing on many of the graves.

Just some more tombstones.

On the way up to the next place, i saw these odd clay statue things.

These next photos are at a war memorial. It seemed like a sort of combined place for all modern wars that japan has fought. These where paper cranes someone had hung near one of the markers.

I made a turtle friend!

View of kyoto from midway up the war memorial.

Japanese graffiti looks super cool

The war memorial had a cemetery behind it, that just sort of sprawled through the woods. Lots of the stone post markers from before, and a few larger ones like this.