The Daibutsu Face and Japanese Tote Bags!

Since my first tote bag in Japan last year, I have become weirdly obsessed with them. Here in the US, I always relied on backpacks to carry my stuff around: books, etc. Now, I like using tote bags instead: they are lighter, easier to carry and hang up, and they force you to think about what you actually need to bring. Tote bags are popular in Japan since they are more compact than backpacks, especially in crowded spaces.

In my recent visit to Japan, the family and I went to stay at the cities of Kyoto and Nara (older posts here and here). In Nara, the biggest draw is the Buddhist temple of Todaiji, which during the Nara Period of Japanese history was the central temple of a vast network that spanned the country. It is also famous for the daibutsu (大仏), or Great Buddha there. I took the featured photo above in 2023 but it doesn’t truly convey the size of the statue. It’s massive.

I didn’t get to enjoy Todaiji this time as much as I would have liked, due to time and painful gout making walking very painful, but I did stumble upon this gem at the gift shop:

They even had a matching tote bag!

I feel bad about using this tote bag sometimes as I don’t want to scuff up the bag or get the Buddha dirty. However, I love using it when I can.

Further, after I got home to the US, my wife and kids picked up another tote bag for me in Japan:

This tote bag is a rendition of a Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra, but using Japanese-language rebus:

For example the word kuu in the Heart Sutra is from the Chinese character 空 meaning (in a Buddhist context) “Emptiness” or Shunyatā in Sanskrit. However kuu is also the Japanese verb “to eat” (食う), hence it shows a picture of a girl eating a rice ball. The word sō from the Heart Sutra for 想 is shown as a monk, which in Japanese is sōryo. The i (意) in the Heart Sutra is expressed using a boar (inoshihi in Japanese), and so on.

Pretty clever. 😆

P.S. Happy Labor Day weekend to folks in the US!