Walking down the streets to Ginza, I stumbled upon a little temple on the side of the road. This isn’t my usual path, but I felt a strange urge to take this route to the shrines in Shinjuku.
The temple squats quietly behind a thin concrete wall isolating it from surrounding resident buildings. It seems that this block was too crowded for the temple to be set on a square, which drew my interest. Squinting at the concrete wall, I yearned to see more of the temple, but only caught a glimpse of it’s top roof.
Circling around the wall, I tried to find an entrance. A small breach was nestled snugly between concrete shells, so I squeezed through. Upon entry, I realized that there was nothing special - the temple was merely another one of the thousand lonely temples in Tokyo city. Empty and quiet, it seems as if no one has entered before. However, the trees were neatly trimmed and the pavements were polished.
“Peaceful,” I thought to myself, allowing my feet to wander. If no one came around, why would the keeper still clean the temple? It is so inconspicuous that very few would even bother to walk in. With a curious desire to stay, I decided to pursue my worship here. Not the stately, magnificent Meiji shrine, nor the exquisite Asakusa - just here. A small, concealed temple. Standing in front of the altar, I tossed a coin to the gods and clapped my hands in prayer for another year’s good fortune. The wind came into a halt, and everything stilled.
I left the temple after my worship, and set foot back into the urban jungle. As I neared the center of the city, crowds and skyscrapers came into view. The clamor was overwhelming. Feeling the sudden urge to contribute to the clamor, I began humming. Soon, I realized that I could not identify the source of the noise. Everyone was quietly walking with their mouths shut and heads down, completely “civilized and polite”. Upon this discovery, I shut my mouth in silence and continued my journey along the clamor.
Where were the noises coming from? In such a repressed city with stringent, suffocating social norms and compressed homes, I imagine many more temples squeezed between streets and roads, quiet and insignificant against the background of Tokyo. The temples only display their roofs to oblivious passerbys, muted by the walls that crowd around their corners. It’s pitiful, but necessary, that the temples are restrained in this fashion to preserve the harmony of the city. Closing my eyes, I embrace the concrete walls that emerge towards me in the city noise.
In the end, we are the temples.
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