PixieKatten

- a photo and travel blog.

When I walked past this window on a street in Nikko, Japan, I thought it was the oddest thing ever with such a huge bowl of rice and the photo hanging above it. When I got back home to Sweden I looked into what it could have been all about and found that it is part of a ceremony at one of the temples in town. The ceremony of compulsory rice eating is called Gohan-shiki. It has a long history in Rinnoji Temple in Nikko. The Gohhan-shiki is carried out on April 2nd. Participants of the Gohhan-shiki will receive the big rice bowl, which contains 5.4 litters of rice. It is believed that the participants will have a family fortune and a healthy life without accidents. So what was first odd to me turned out to be a tradition there.. and that's why I love to travel. To learn about and explore other cultures and traditions.

Pic is a part of:

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Tags: odd shots on a monday, japan, nikko, gohhan-shiki, resa, foto

whole new meaning to egg fried rice

Now that is one huge bowl of rice -- almost looked like big scoop of ice cream! Come and see my odd shot.

No that is a briliinat find. Perfectly odd.

Interesting tradition with the bowl of rice.

It looks too round to be true. That rice must have been glued to a ball or something.

Here in the USA, we don't have eating ceremonies, we have eating contests. Like, who can eat the most pie or the most hot dogs. Instead of good health and fortune, you get probably a belly ache and a wee bit of cash. :D



Tink ~~*



PS - sorry I have not been around much - was visiting family in NY and had to cut it short to deal with a bad tropical storm back home. Still getting some fallout from the storm today with intermittent squalls. So, I have lots of blog-reading to catch up on!

I thought the tradition of over-eating was a strictly American thing.

I wuld think that odd if I passed it on the street. Thank you for explaining why it was there.