About an hour south of Tokyo is the historic town of Kamakura. From the 1180s until the early 1300s this was the political and spiritual center of Japan. Although the Imperial seat was still in Kyoto during this time, Kamakura was where the military government (shogunate) held power over the feudal lords of Japan. As a result, this coastal town is chock full of important temples and historic locations. Its proximity to Tokyo makes it an ideal day trip.
We made our way to the Kotoku-in temple first, since seeing the Great Buddha statue (Daibutsu) is probably the top attraction here. The Daibutsu is a seated buddha made of hollow bronze. It's the second tallest bronze Buddha in Japan at 11.3 meters/37 feet tall (only the Buddha at Todai-ji in Nara is taller). The seated statue was originally cast in 1252 and was kept inside the shelter of a large hall that was destroyed and rebuilt a couple of times before the Japanese just decided to leave the Buddha to the open air in the early 1500s.
Our next stop on the Kamakura temple crawl was Hasadera Temple. This is another Buddhist temple, but this one is perched on a hill with an expansive view of Sagami Bay.
The temple also has some pretty gardens, a koi pond, and a cave you can walk through. It was one of the less crowded temples we visited, probably because it is a bit of a workout to get to it.
As I mentioned the temple is on a hill, and to get to it you walk up several flights of stairs past many small statues, called jizo. These statues are very common in many temples around Japan. Jizo statues are believed to guide the spirits of children who died before their parents and help them cross into the afterlife. The statues at this temple are placed there by families who are mourning a child lost to miscarriage or stillbirth. They are peaceful guardians and their presence serves as a reminder that love connects us even after loss.
The next temple we went to was one of our favorites. Tsurugaoka Hachimangu shrine is the most important Shinto shrine in Kamakura. It's colloquially known as the "samurai shrine" because the Kamakura shogunate established it in its present location. Many shrines have walls of decorative sake barrels near the main building. Sake and rice offerings show reverence to the gods. Sake that has been offered to the gods is called omiki.
Hachimangu shrine was a beehive of activity today. There were several weddings happening. There was a huge crowd of onlookers at the biggest one, both tourists and locals alike, so we joined the rest of the wedding crashers and gaped at the wedding finery while their formal photos were being taken. The bride is wearing a wataboshi headdress that is the Japanese equivalent of a bridal veil to symbolize purity in marriage. She also wears a very formal kimono, called a Shiromuku.
In one corner of the shrine grounds there is a pond with several islands connected by zigzag wooden bridges. And on the shore of the pond we stumbled into a beautiful peony garden with flowers in full bloom.
There are over a hundred temples and shrines in the Kamakura area, but we didn't have time to see them all. By the end of the day it was getting late and we only had time for one more, so we made a 20-minute-long trek to the Zen Buddhist temple of Houkokuji, hoping to get there before it closed at 4pm.
We made it with an hour to spare, but we were a little bit disappointed. It's not a very big or impressive structure and the surrounding garden isn't very large either. We had hoped to enjoy tea in the temple's tearoom, but they had stopped serving since the temple was closing soon. There was a small but beautiful bamboo grove which kind of made up for the initial disappointment. We remember the crazy crowds at the Arashiyama bamboo grove in Kyoto on our last trip in 2019. So the quiet serenity and lack of crowds here at Houkokuji made it more worth the visit. Although it is a touristy town, Kamakura was a nice change of scenery for us from the busy city of Tokyo. We really enjoyed the historic charm of this beautiful town.
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