A happy new year, and thank you very much for your frequently coming. It's a start of the fifth year for this home page "Yamato no Dorei".
We Japanese go to the Hatsumoude on the New Year's day, it refers to the first visit to a shrine or temple. People make various invocations at this time, including good health throughout the year, safety of one's family, or successfully passing an examination. You can find Koma-inu, Lion and Korean Guardian Dogs, when you visit shrines.
Among the surprisingly large number of animals to appear in religions art, lions are frequently situated on the pedestals of Buddhist and the bases of pagodas in the role of guardians of the Buddist world. Lions are often represented as a pair set at left and right, but a single lion sometimes serves to support the bodhisattva Manjusri who sits upon its back.
At Sinto shrines one finds the pairing of an open-mouthed lion emitting the first Sanskrit vowel, pronounced "ah" in Japanese, and the honed and closed-mouth Korean guardian dog uttering the last, "un". Their placement at the boundary of shrine precincts become customary. In most cases both of the figures in each pair are male, but on rare occasion one of the figures is female.