Ship Shrine

Walked up to Kotohira-gu, the largest shrine complex on Shikoku. It is a Shinto shrine, but used to be (before the Meiji restoration picked Shinto as the national religion) a joint shrine with a Buddhist river/sea god called Konpira. to keep the theme, a seafaring shinto god is now enshrined here, and as a result many boats make donations here, and the shrine has a huge number of photos of boats, as well as a painting of Japans first astronaut. There was also a real solar powered boat in the shrine which seemed to have been donated. This was a little surprising as the main shrine is up 700 steps, and the top shrine up 600 more! Maybe they flew it in...

Bye Barbara