Shrine Decoded

There is writing everywhere in shinto shrines, and if -- like me -- you don't read Japanese (or Chinese) then it is very hard to work out what it all means. Now that computer translation tools can work on images as well as on selected text, it has been possible for me to photograph some of this writing and then have the computer translate. Since I don't have the requisite software on my phone, this doesn't happen until I am back home afterwards. Nonetheless, it has been an interesting experience, and has definitely improved my understanding of what is going on.

One of the closest shrines to our house is Hachi-jinja, a small shrine just beyond the Silver Temple, that is on several levels on a wooded slope. All of the following photos were taken this morning at Hachi-jinja and some of them I subsequently put through the image / translation process.

I have been to enough shinto shrines at this point to have a good basic sense of what bits are for what purpose, and this extends to some of the written elements as well. So the first class of image translations did not demystify for me what the written symbols were about in the general sense but they did give me specific information as to their meanings.

For example, my understanding was that anytime you see a row of vertical orange boards with writing on them then this is probably a list of people and businesses that have donated money for the upkeep of the shrine (and this is also true of rows of lanterns with writing on them):

The image translation bore this out, and you can see a mixture of individuals and businesses listed below:

Another standard feature of shrines is an open-sided building with a roof that contains large barrels of sake.

These are offerings from local breweries, and this was also borne out by the image translation:

Another feature that I was familiar with was the name of the shrine being on a plaque above the gate:

Sometimes the name is written on a single large lantern rather than on a plaque:

The second class of image translations were signs whose purposes were not clear to me just from their locations and/or their general forms.

For example, what is this sign on a nearby tree about?

It's a label describing the tree, which makes sense!

Or this sign, on an otherwise anonymous fence:

The third category of image translations were signs that were either too complicated, too archaic, or too faded for the computer to properly latch on to what is going on. Here are a couple of examples:

The computer could not make much sense of the carved symbols on this stone slab. It offers no translation for over half of the symbols, and what is translated hardly amounts to a coherent narrative thread. (I especially like the juxtaposition of "car oil" and "god" in the lower portion of the translation.)

A second example is the -- rather faded -- wooden sign picture below:

The result of image translation on this example produced fragments of text that -- collectively -- border on the surreal ("the rainy rice, the night and the new year, the beast of Fengshui"; "stand up, stand up"; "original deity"; "comodern"; "thousands of people ten thousand ten bright creations").

So while the image translation tool has certainly given me insights into many aspects of Hachi-jinja (and of other shrines), it is nice to know that there is still a role for human translators!