"Traditional" Japan

Today, I am going to combine my posts. Both of these pictures show a nice juxapostion of modernity and "traditional" Japan. The first photo is of a field of rice in the middle of Hirakata city and the second photo is of a shrine that is across from the field. The shrine also happens to be a park, hence the slide in the background. When foreigners think about traditional Japan, temples and shrines are sometimes conjured. And whenever we think of an Asia country, rice comes to mind. I thought it was interesting to see a field of rice in the middle of a city or a slide in the middle of a shrine. A shrine or rice fields are the Oreintalist stereotypes we expect to see, but not like this, in a modern setting. Like the Newsweek article suggests, we want to view Japan as the ancient land of the samurai and fail to see what it has evolved into today. We are too busy looking at the temple than see the massive city around it.