I believe I have a bazillion pictures of one temple today. We went driving around with Dr. and Mrs. Kobayashi. Dr. Kobayashi usually is busy and we don’t see him that often, but he took us to a temple and a museum of Tomohiro Hoshino’s watercolors.

I can’t remember the name of the temple, but it’s in Saitama Prefecture and just received the status of “National Treasure.” They repainted and regilded (I think) the carvings to replicate their original colors and they’re quite spectacular.

But before that, the traditional chrysanthemum displays of the season.

This is a picture of the outer gate. The roof is unique in the Kanto region. I think this is the gate from Yamaguchi Prefecture and there are more examples of the roofline there.

This is actually this inner gate is the first one we went to. This is the only picture I have of Mrs. Kobayashi, my mom, and Dr. Kobayashi.

This is a larger inner gate.

One of the temple guards in the inner gate. This guy was on the right side. The guy on the left side was being restored.

This is the temple itself.

If you pay extra, you can see the back side of the temple and get an explanatory tour.

The back is definitely something to see.

 The panels are all of gods playing.

This is the back.

And the inner side.

In the explanation of the paintings they talked about looking for the original paints for two years.

For lunch we went to a small shop next to the temple that was pretty busy and is probably going to get even busier. They had unagi and 

After that Dr. Kobayashi kept insisting that we go to the Tomihiro Hoshino museum. We followed the route the GPS suggested and I was asleep until we hit a dirt road. It didn’t seem like an actual dirt road, but a road under construction. After that we went down a windy mountain road that was barely wide enough for one car. We met two cars on the way and there were only inches to spare to get by. The road we were on was a prefectural route so now I know that prefectural routes can be goat paths.

Tomihiro Hoshino is a man who became quadriplegic and learned to write and draw using his mouth. He paints watercolors and writes poetry and that’s pretty darn impressive.

We went to a sushi & unagi restaurant in Takasaki for dinner. Usually you don’t see those together, especially not this good.

So that’s Day 45.