Below are pictures from a rainy sunday in Funabashi (船橋) . The town in Chiba prefecture (千葉県) is probably best known for it's famous shopping mall Lala-port (ららぽーと) and the first Ikea in Japan. Straying through the city, one can also find a lot of temples and shrines, not unusual for a Japanese city. However, what stroke me were 2 things. First, one of the shrines I saw shared the name with the famous shrine on Miyajima (宮島) near Hiroshima (広島) (although they are written using slightly different characters). And second, some shrines appeared to have recently encountered problems with vandalism. This wouldn't be a big deal in Europe or other Western countries where the younger generation tends to be more subordinate. But in Japan, I haven't heard about vandalism at sacral institutions yet. So at a particular shrine I visited, there were signs in front of almost every stoned building, lantern or pole that told you not to "climb", "come near" or "touch" things. Those signs are really annoying and take away a part of the special feeling at those places for they don't really belong there. And seriously, who possibly would think about climbing a monument that was put there to remember the people who fought in the Sino-Japanese war?
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