Forum - View topicINTEREST: Ultraman Transforms Into Salamander in Artist's Statue
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Chrno2
 Posts: 6171 Location: USA |
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That is pretty funny. At the same time it's really nice. Who would've ever have thought of a salamander? But it would also make an interesting monster for the Ultraman universe.
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hyojodoji
Posts: 584 |
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The building which contains the Takashimaya branch store in question is in a fringe part of Shibuya Ward. But, since the branch store in question is very near to Shinjuku Station and commercial area-wise the branch store belongs to Shinjuku, Takashimaya calls it Takashimaya Shinjuku Store. (Takashimaya's flagship store in the Tōkyō area is in Nihonbashi, where rich merchants had their shops also in the Edo period.) However, if you think that 'Which administrative district?' is more important, it is fine. As to relations between Shibuya and department stores, as also novelist Kobayashi Nobuhiko, who comes from an old family in Tōkyō, said, Shibuya has been well-known as a battlefield where the Tōkyū Group fights against the corporate group which has the Seibu department stores. (The Takashimaya department stores belong to another corporate group.)
Actually, that type of team of Fūjin and Raijin (i.e. the deity who has a bag to generate wind and the deity who has drums to generate thunder) is deities who serve Avalokiteśvara, a bodhisattva. The website of Rengéōin, which will be mentioned later, says that they are deities in ancient India who were adopted into Buddhism. Dr Sadakata Akira, a scholar of Buddhism, wrote:
The statues of Fūjin and Raijin in the Rengéōin Buddhist temple are well-known. It is said that Fūjin and Raijin in Tawaraya Sōtatsu's famous picture, which the Ken'nin-ji temple entrusted to the Kyōto National Museum, were partly modelled on those statues in Rengéōin. You can find that team of Fūjin and Raijin also in a mural in the 249th grotto in Mògāo kū, famous Chinese Buddhist grottoes. The 249th grotto was made during the Xīwèi dynasty. You may have seen, regarding religions in Japan, someone say, '"Gods" belong to Shintō, not Buddhism,' or something along those lines, but in reality it is something like 'writing down to laymen in an overly simplistic way' or a not-very-accurate notion which laymen (including native users of Japanese who are not very knowledgeable about the traditional part of Japanese culture) tend to have. When, in stuff related to traditional Japanese culture, you see a supernatural being which native users of English are likely to regard as 'god' or 'deity', it would be better for you not to hastily jump at the conclusion 'This supernatural being is a Shintō god.' Just a suggestion. Some people in the ANN fora who visited Sensō-ji in Asakusa, Tōkyō may remember the Thunder Gate, the god of wind and the god of thunder. Since the temple is dedicated to Avalokiteśvara, the temple's having those statues makes sense. And some people in the ANN fora may have read the Miyamoto Musashi novel by Yoshikawa Eiji. In the novel, Miyamoto Musashi duelled with Yoshioka Denshichirō at Rengéōin. Yoshikawa Eiji wrote:
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