The last time I went to this place — 1 year ago
I used to live here, at this Rinzai Zen temple, 22 years ago. Based on a general of which way to go, rather than by recognizing any landmarks, we came upon it, which also looks from the outside much as it did before. I confess I was feeling very shy about the whole thing, and rather regretting setting up the meeting.
We were welcomed and ushered into a fancy room with Chinese-style furniture and chairs. There we drank iced green tea and fed slices of pound cake. The o-sho-san appeared, and I presented a box of Applets and Cotlets. He speaks zero English, but by this point, I could bumble along now a little bit in my partially-remembered Japanese. I remarked on how so little looks the same as it did, and this caused him to talk about the earthquake. While the temple’s statuary survived, apparently the plaster/adobe crumbled significantly and had to be rebuilt.
It is difficult for me to believe that he is 75 years old. He is like someone at least 15 years younger – looks great and had no problem climbing the steep steps to the temple’s second floor. He played the taiko drums for us all with enthusiasm, which was quite impressive. He led us all around the building, and we took some pictures.
At the very end, he fetched some cards with a traditional decoration, and then caligraphered some words for us, and stamped them with his chop. Since he is a Japan National Treasure in caligraphy, I was highly honored.
After visiting, I was worried that the cards the O-sho-san had done for us would get dropped and bruised or bent. So I stopped in a traditional Japanese stationery store to at least get an envelope to put them in. The proprietor, when she saw the cards, got traditional frames for them, which is great, because they are oddly sized by our standards, and I’d have to get them custom-framed in the US. I then said that they had been written on by the O-sho-san of Shoryuji, and her entire mien changed. No longer just professionally polite, she now looked quite impressed, and her husband in the back stood up. She told me that the O-sho-san was a regular customer for their papers (and later we speculated that the cards might have even been originally purchased there) and that they were well-acquainted with the O-sho-san’s late wife. When I then dropped that I lived there 23 years ago, they sucked in their collective breath even more greatly, which secretly I enjoyed.
