I was invited to go on a tour of three temples in the area on my birthday so I grabbed my camera and off I went.  Although books about the country will tell you that the majority of the Japanese are Buddhist, realistic estimates of how many people actually practice the religion put the numbers at about 10 percent of the population.  As with any other religion, interest peaks as people enter their senior years and with the exception of our group of four 30 year olds, the rest of the 2 buses' customers were double our age.

The tour itself involved listening to the priests and wandering around and looking at the flowers that were in bloom.  The priests don't really preach at you about the religion so much, they more or less talk about moral issues like happiness and death.  With most of the visitors to temples being senior citizens, I guess the death/afterlife talk is to cater to them.  Aside from the annual visits to temples to ask God to make them rich, very few young people practice the religion.  (I will go into more detail about how this fact influences Japanese pop culture in next month's Japanese Fashion page -I was going to put it on this month but I don't have all of our Europe trip pictures yet.) 

The Buddhist religion places great importance on being one with nature and learning from the natural environment.  Henceforth temples in Japan always have an abundance of flowers and very beautiful gardens.  Here are some pictures that I took of the gardens.  There are some more pictures in the monthly pictures section.  Click for a larger view.