Sign here

At the start of our tour in Tokyo we met up with a friend who has just moved to Japan who told us about shrine books - blank fold out books that you can take to each shrine you visit and have signed by the resident calligrapher. We looked everywhere for one but didn't come across them until we reached Nara, the ancient capital city of Japan.

We realised why when we found them - it's a tradition in Buddhist not Shinto shrines so we'd been looking in the wrong temples. By the time we found this out it was too late to buy one for ourselves but we bought one to take back to Tokyo for our friend and had it signed in Todai-ji, Nara's Hall of the Great Buddha, the biggest wooden structure in the world. Here's the calligrapher signing and dating the book.