Okutsumiya: The Turtle Is Looking at You

Eyes on the ceiling

The painting fills one square of a coffered ceiling. A green shell spreads wide over gold leaf, scaly legs splay out on either side, and in the middle is a face pointed straight down at whoever is standing underneath. It is known as the Happō-nirami no Kame: the turtle that glares in all eight directions.

A face painted looking straight out of a flat picture still reads as one turned toward you, even from an angle. Photograph it from the side without the ceiling in the shot, though, and nobody will believe you moved.

So here is the ceiling.

Signed and dated

To the right of the turtle, a few lines of ink give a date in the summer of 1803 and a signature: Hōitsu.

Sakai Hōitsu was the younger brother of the lord of Himeji, a writer of haikai and comic verse as well as a painter. In later life he devoted himself to the work of an earlier master, Ogata Kōrin, whose style he carried on in Edo.

The years and the sea air were hard on his gold leaf. The original is now kept in the shrine’s treasure house, having done its share of watching. The turtle on the ceiling is a copy, painted by Kataoka Kayō in 1994.

Paddles and dragons

Inside the hall, two giant wooden rice paddles stand on either side of the view through to the sanctuary behind.

Two stones on one path

Out in the grounds, on the left of a path, sits a plain, round boulder. Its inscription names the man who offered it, Unosuke, and gives its weight: eighty kan, an old unit, or about 300 kilograms. Unosuke was a strongman, called in his day the strongest man in Japan. He toured the country lifting things, and in 1833 he performed before the shogun. This stone is thought to come from a show of strength in front of the crowds at a festival for Benzaiten, the goddess long worshipped on the island.

A little farther on is a stone with a pattern of plates across its top, like a shell. It is called the Kikkō-ishi, the tortoiseshell stone.

How it got here is said to be recorded in a chronicle of events in Edo. In 1806, a devotee of Benzaiten copied out a sutra and wanted to lay it to rest somewhere pure, with a stone on top. Looking for a suitable one, he came across a stone shaped like a turtle, and gave it to Enoshima.

The musician and the mould

A little way off, a bronze figure in a hood sits among the trees with a fan in his hand.

The lanterns

Beside the hall stands a pair of stone lanterns, given in 1846 by a man from a village in Tama, west of Edo. They are carved almost all over: dragons, a bird and, on the bases, whole scenes with people in them.