A Gallery of Komainu from the Hita Kaido

 

The Hita Kaido, the old highway that ran from Kurume to Hita, is also called yamanobenomichi, literally the road that runs along the edge of the mountains.

If you look on mas you will see that these yamanobenomichi are where the majority of the shrines and temples are, at the base of the mountains. I try to take these roads as much as possible for this reason. 

I am trying to document such things as komainu becaise I see the diversity of such things is gradually being replaced with a monocultural, standard, style. New komainu being installed in shrines across the country are all of the one design.

Many of the komainu pictured here are rather chunky in style

All of them are the stone type, placed usually on the approach to the shrine, rather than the wooden, painted ones found inside.

I realize blogs are now an outdated format, and twitter, youtube, instagram etc are more popular, and also that my subjects are not of interest to a wide audience.....

A large part of my reasons for continuing is because I am trying to catalog my photo collection, so that I can quickly find photos bt subject and topic.

Every post has a collection of tags at the bottom, so for instance if you wanted to see more photos of komainu, you click on the komainu tag.

Clicking this link has the same result.

I appreciate you reading this far, and if you have any requests for specific topics or sites please ask and I may be able to oblige as I have more than 100,000 photos not yet posted.

Best wishes for the New Year