I was looking for a cloth used to wrap a baby for the 29-day ceremony. Seiichiro and I went to a religious articles shop but all the cloths I liked were for the altar, not the baby. "Oh," says Seiichiro suddenly, "I got it. That's shrine stuff. This is temple stuff."

Shrines are Shinto, temples are Buddhist. Generally, temples are larger. Sometimes in the garden of a temple there'll be a shrine. No point in offending the old gods, or the Emperor, who's descended from them.

This is the O-bon period, when special attention is paid to the souls of the ancestors. In Kyoto they light huge bonfires on the hillsides in the shape of kanji characters to help the ancestor's spirits find their way home. 4 of them, anyway. According to our guide in Kyoto, "We'ew very busy, so we don't want them to stay too long." So the 5th hillside burns with, basically, a character for "Thank you for coming, have a nice trip home."

Also during O-bon, the Shinto priests do a brisk business in prayers at the altars of private homes. According to Seiichiro, who, although he has an altar at home (he puts out fresh water next to a picture of his grandmother and his father, prays "just saying hello to them" and then the cat jumps up and drinks from the water cup) is a little skeptical about religion, this is because the families make a nice contribution to the shrine in return for O-bon prayers. This results in the phenomenon of Shinto priests in gauzy black robes over blus underrobes whizzing around town on motorscooters because they can get more homes in that way.