I open the new year with some photographs from my visit to a Kyoto shrine on New Year's Day. Rather than visiting the larger shrines inside the city which were sure to be packed, my partner and I decided to go to a shrine on the western edge of Kyoto....
Full story and photographs here: photoethnography.com/gallery/paw2005/
Update 2005.01.05: Asahi.com reports that over 93 million people in Japan visited shrines or temples in the New Year's period. Given that the population of Japan is 127 million, that's pretty impressive - about 73%. Does anyone have stats on church attendance in the U.S. on Christmas?
