Tag: Divination

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Deadprogrammer Visits Japan Part III : Monk Money

Money-making schemes are a on my mind a lot lately, so here’s a little bit about ingenious schemes by which Japanese monks are raising money.

As I don’t have much understanding of Buddhism and Shinto, Japanese temples did not leave much impression upon me. After a while, they all started to look alike. One common element was the fundraising gimmicks used by the monks which I found rather ingenious.

First up, there’s omikuji, literally “sacred lottery.” You deposit a 100 yen (about $1) coin in a slot (on an honor system), shake a metal container with wooden stick marked with a hieroglyph (probably a number), match it up to a drawer and take out a sheet of paper. The fortunes contain a variety of outcomes, from blessing – dai-kichi (now I know what Daikichi Sushi restaurants are named after:), through lesser forchunes such as near-small-blessing, sue-shō-kichi, and to great curse – dai-kyō.

The genius of the system is that if you don’t like your fortune, you can tie it on special pine planks (according to Wikipedia it’s a pun – “pine tree” is “matsu” and “to wait” is “matsu”). Then you can try again.

Somewhere, I think it was near Ryoan-ji Temple I encountered this attraction. A little statue of a deity with a little bowl next to it. From what I understand, you need to throw a coin into the bowl for good luck. As you can see, it’s not too easy. My wife managed to get a 5 yen coin in though.

Here are temple workers collecting the bounty. They even have little bamboo rakes!

Then there’s Zeniarai Benten Shrine, where you can rent a special basket to wash your money is an underground spring, that is supposed to double your money. I hope washing a banking card works too :)

I’d like to finish this with a little news item that I pulled from Mainichi news: Man who stole 2 yen from shrine sentenced to 22 months behind bars. A yen is about 1 cent. Pretty rough, eh? Well, the article goes on to say that he also stole some batteries…

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The Deadprogrammer Tarot Project

For a very long time I wanted to create my own Tarot deck. Complex symbolism of classic Tarot decks such as the Rider-Waite-Smith makes it next to impossible to recreate them faithfully in photographic format without posing people and items (which would look lame of course). I do want to stay relatively close to RWS canon though, so I am thinking about digitally altering my images to add swords and other things not commonly found in XXI century New York.

Please treat these as sketches, because final versions will probably be way different.

The Tower: Brooklyn College heating plant’s smokestack is as good a Tower as any. Maybe I’ll shoot it some day in a lightning storm.

The Moon: I need to reshoot this with the Moon between the towers and with the pond visible in the picture, but I think this is the right location for the card. The towers are Pierre Hotel on the left and Sherry Netherland Hotel on the right.

The Magician: I saw what is probably a bicycle inner tube rolled up in an infinity symbol along the glistening subway rails one morning, and the first thing that came to my mind was the Tarot card. Theoretically this should be a man with an infinity symbol over his head, but I really like this photo.

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Starmagic


There used to be a little novelty store near NYU called Starmagic. I think I bought a deck of Tarot cards there, and some slinkies over the years. Then it disappeared leaving only an empty shell of a room with weird conduit pipes hanging from the ceiling. Seeing it empty at night made me realize how tiny that store was and how crammed with silly-space-age-glow-in-the-dark-made-in-China-tchockes it was. Goodbye, Starmagic.