Last night I met up with Eric, the ALT from Iwate-Machi, after my Japanese class at the international plaza and we went to a nice sushi place on odori with some teachers from his school. It turns out a few of them were jazz fans and we talked about our favorite musicians. I also explained about my interest in Japanese religion, and one of the said that the Japanese had no religion. So those shrines, temples, and festivals are all an elaborate joke on foreigners, huh? I understood what he was saying, though. One of my professors at Nanzan talked about it; even though the Japanese do a lot of things that are considered religion by foreigners, they don't think of themselves as religious. Eric crashed at my place in my sleeping bag and we went with Erin, the Iwaizumi ALT, to the Iwate Prefecture Art Museum to see the opening of a new exhibit. Eric had received two free tickets from teachers he worked with. The exhibit had a wide variety of art styles; there were photos, traditional calligraphy scrolls, woodblock prints, to mention a few. One of the weirdest was a sculpture of a dead body made entirely of cotton balls and foil pill wrappers. All the work was modern and all of it came from Iwate, I think. Some of the landscapes done in black ink on white paper were pretty amazing. We also checked out the galleries dedicated to local artists. One of them seemed to favor Christian themes; he made a series of plastic statues of some of the martyrs of Nagasaki and some bronzes of Jesus and stone statues of Mary Magdalene. There was also an excellent mini-library about art on the second floor. I spent a few hours pouring over a series of books on historical Japanese art. It was awesome being able to see so many color plates of Heian Period Buddhist statuary, including statues of the bodhisattvas, buddhas, and deities that I wrote about for my thesis. I love how Tendai and Shingon have all these additional figures that they focus on to exclusion of the actual historical Buddha. I get so tired of people in the West talking about how secular and free of gods Buddhism is. Of course, it's possible to be a Buddhist and be that way, but it's not inherent to the religion. Buddhism is an incredibly varied tradition. Smug secular atheist Buddhism is but one possible interpretation. That probably bothers me too much.