Term · Japanese culture
Torii
Two uprights, two crossbeams, no door and no walls, and everything past it counts as somewhere else.
In Otakana the clue reads: Gate marking the entrance to a shrine
- Type
- Term
- Series
- Japanese culture
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
The gate marks a boundary. On one side is ordinary ground, on the other the grounds of a Shinto shrine, and walking under the gate is the act that moves you across. Custom asks you to bow before passing and to keep off the exact centre of the path, which is left for the deity. There is nothing to lock and nothing to close, because the point is the line rather than the barrier.
The classic form is vermilion, a colour tied to protection and to the mercury-based preservative once painted onto the wood. Plain wood and stone versions are just as traditional. Individuals and companies donate them as thanks for something granted, and the donor's name is carved into an upright, which is why some shrines accumulate hundreds.
Two examples do most of the work in photographs. Fushimi Inari in Kyoto has thousands of donated gates packed into tunnels running up a hillside. Itsukushima at Miyajima has a large one standing in the sea, cut off from the shore at high tide. On a map of Japan, the gate is also the symbol printed to mark a shrine.
Spelling TORII
TORII is the double letter word of this set. Five letters ending in two Is, to-ri-i, three beats with the last one a full vowel of its own. Anyone spelling by ear writes TORI and stops one short. The extra I is the whole puzzle here, and there are no long vowels or dropped Us to worry about.