Torri gateway

The wooden shrines you see everywhere with the red torii gateways are Shinto places of worship. These torii are the easy way of telling s Shinto shrine from a Buddhist temple, which doesn't have them. Torii actually means "bird-perch", which is easy to remember because lots of birds do. If you can toss up a stone and make it rest on top of torii, it is very good luch, but not for the birds. - robert ainsley

Surely we have something to learn from the people in whose mind the simple chant of a cricket can awaken whole fairy-swarms of tender and delicate fancies. We may boast of being their masters in the mechanical,their teachers of the artificial in all its varieties of ugliness; but in the knowledge of the natural, in the feeling of the joy and beauty of earth, they exceed us like the Greeks of old. Yet perhaps it will be only when our blind aggressive industrialism has wasted and sterilized their paradise - substituting everywhere for beauty of utilitarian, the conventional, the vulgar, the utterly hideous- that we shall begin with remorseful amazement to comprehend the charm of that which we destroyed. - Lafcadio Hearn