Word: shrine
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...where he decided to become an artist. Growing up in Kotohira, a backwater town on Shikoku island in southern Japan, he rarely gave any thought to art. But one of his best friends was the son of the head priest of Kotohira-gu, commonly called Konpira, an important Shinto shrine that is the town's great pride and that is said to date back more than 2,000 years. So Takubo spent a lot of time on the shrine's grounds, climbing up and down the complex's infamously forbidding 785 steps, and watching the pilgrims who would come...
...pieces have been seen by the public in 125 years. Takubo says it is fate that he should return to liberate the works he loves more than all others by offering them to everybody. It all came about when his childhood friend, Yasutsugu Kotooka, who is the shrine's 22nd head priest, asked him a few years ago what special events could be held in 2004 to coincide with Senza-Sai, a festival the shrine holds only once every 33 years. "For a long time, he has wanted to make the art available," Takubo says, "but it was hard...
...Perhaps the most influential priest in the shrine's history was Yuzon, an avid painter and powerful art patron who lived there in the late 1700s and whose portrait is among the shown works. He commissioned not just Jakuchu's flowers but also the fine mid-Edo-style door screens in the building's more public areas, where the priest would receive guests. Painted in the late 18th century by Okyo Maruyama, each screen has a different theme, such as cranes, tigers, wise men and waterfalls. Okyo was an important transitional figure in Japanese art, as painting moved toward...
...good measure, there's also the sheer beauty of the architecture at Kotohira-gu. Alongside the dozens of historic wooden shrines, one new addition is a stunning mountaintop building that houses offices as well as a reception area for religious ceremonies?an ultramodern edifice of rusted iron and glass built into the hillside in a way that complements the main shrine building surprisingly well. Takubo helped design the new building with architect Ryoji Suzuki. Its innovative use of light and space?many of the rooms are actually freestanding boxes in the middle of a glassed-in atrium?has made...
...third time this year Copple had sustained the injury, first this spring and then again during the Shrine Bowl—an All-Star game for graduating Nebraska seniors, on July 24. Nor is he a stranger to the surgery—he has had the same procedure performed on his right shoulder. He had hoped treatment could be postponed until after his first semester at Harvard...