In spring 2017, we had the immense joy of returning to Japan, many years after our first trip to the archipelago. I wanted to share with you a few snippets of our stay, in a series of articles, in order to take you on a journey. I hope you like them! To begin, I wanted to tell you more about a very nice meeting I had in Kamakura, a city located southwest of Tokyo, on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

At the end of this article, you will be able to find a map which brings together the different places that I tell you about in my “travel” articles!

This meeting is a real favorite! I loved starting our trip with this beautiful first day in Japan, in the city of Kamakura, during which we met Mrs. Mito Shizue.

Mito Shizue has been a ceramics teacher for many years now and supplied the Honkaku-Ji temple adorable little charms with smiling faces, nigiri fuku . This temple is located in the town of our precious Hiromi who works with us at the shop. Several years ago, she brought me some of these charms and when we planned our trip together, I absolutely wanted to meet this artist!

I have a lot of admiration for this artistic practice, full of generosity, that is ceramics! Every month, Mito Shizue produces a very large quantity of small charms. She bakes them like delicious little cookies, in an oven at a very low temperature.

She began her business of producing grigris through her husband, a painter known to residents of Kamakura town. Indeed, he was friends with the monk of one of the city's temples who then needed a little money to ensure the maintenance of the temple. They looked for a solution together and that's how she started making these adorable lucky charms!



We walked several kilometers together and had a really lovely time! It seems that Madam Shizue loved walking with us. I have very good memories of this day and I will undoubtedly come back to see it during our next trip to Japan.

On our way, we were able to admire the beautiful flowers of paper bushes or mitsumata . It is a type of shrub whose fibers can be used for the production of Japanese paper! During our visit, we also discovered in the Hase-Dera temple, these adorable statues with smiling faces called nagomi-jizô and which symbolize calm and appeasement.

We also had the chance to observe a monk creating calligraphy during our visit to Honkaku-Ji temple. He calligraphs a type of notebook called g oshuin sho (from shu (red), in (stamp) and cho (notebook)). It's an old tradition in Japan to keep this personal notebook! It comes in the form of an accordion and allows you to keep a record of your visit each time you visit a temple. Indeed, the monk inscribes pretty sentences, prayers, his name, the place and the date... I find the object really very beautiful and full of history! Maybe on my next trip to Kamakura, I will bring my own notebook too.

I hope this article has taken you on a journey and made you want to discover the city of Kamakura! I'll see you again very soon for new travel articles in Japan.

Adeline