A stone Jizō figure in a red bib — when there are no words left

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

A careful gesture

Beyond Arashiyama, it grows quieter. In northern Sagano, on an old stretch of the Atago-kaidō road, the air smells of wet wood, and light seeps through the branches as if through shōji paper. We walk slowly, because you simply shouldn’t hurry here: the stones underfoot are uneven, the drainage channel along the wall holds a thin mirror of water after the rain, and at the fork stand tiny figures. Stone figurines. They are called “Jizō” — so small and so charming that the first impulse is almost automatic: step closer, smile, take a photo.

Only when we come nearer does something far deeper reveal itself beneath that charm. Around the figurine’s neck someone has tied a soft, red bib. It is fresh, washed, carefully arranged, as if someone did it with trembling fingers, but with a stubbornness that does not know surrender. The little cap has uneven stitches — you can see it was knitted by hand at home. Under the stone lie coins and a small, neatly placed toy car. And suddenly we understand that somehow it isn’t right to take an Instagram photo here, that this little figure is not here to look cute.

Because in Japan, Jizō is not decoration. He is a bodhisattva close to the ground — one you go to without intimidation when a choking pain knots your tongue. When you can no longer speak of it to anyone. Jizō — 地蔵 — sounds like a promise: literally “the earth’s storehouse,” a repository for what is fragile — and what is most fragile is often a life that did not get the chance to begin, or only just began. Hence mizuko (水子) — “the water child”: a concept that holds miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion, death in the early years of childhood; and hence these caps, bibs, small coins — a language of care for a relationship that cannot be closed with ordinary words. Today’s text will be about how Japan tames boundaries: of roads, of life, and of memory — and how a roadside Jizō speaks of the hardest things: of children who did not manage to become part of the world, and of mothers left with love that has no addressee. When mourning is not only death, but also an unlived life, all the roles and days that never came — then often a gesture at a Jizō figure will convey pain and tenderness better than clumsy language ever could.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

Walking the Atago-kaidō

Beyond Arashiyama, it becomes different. Not “prettier” — simply calmer. The crowd stays somewhere behind your back, like the hum of a highway that suddenly stops dominating when you step into a side street. Northern Sagano has that peculiar softness: houses stand closer to the earth than to the sky, roofs seem to remember previous centuries, and the air smells of wood and dampness, as if rain were a permanent member of the household. We walk the old road uphill — the Atago-kaidō, a former pilgrimage route leading toward Atago-jinja on Mount Atago, the same mountain people have trekked to for centuries in search of protection from fire and misfortune.

The landscapes are beautiful, but not spectacular — this is not Miyajima nor Amanohashidate (To See One’s Own Path Through the “Heavenly Bridge” in the Japanese Sumi-e Art of Master Sesshu). But perhaps that is why it works. A stone under your foot may be uneven, the light muted, and the street — because technically we are still “in the city” — behaves like a country lane. Saga-Toriimoto has long had a reputation as a place where time lays down its layers like lacquer: and where you can still see that this was a route to a sacred mountain, not merely “a pretty district for photos.”

And then a fork appears — so ordinary you could almost miss it. And yet here, precisely here, stands something like a small gate, one no one built of wood or stone arches: eight old figures, “Hattai Jizō” (八体地蔵尊). Eight faces — in practice, rather eight outlines of faces, because time has turned them into half-smiles and half-shadows. And still, someone regularly puts white bibs on them, someone brings flowers, someone writes on the cloth words about safety in the district, about children, about the road. It creates a strange effect: suddenly you feel you’re not looking at a “monument,” but at a relationship that continues. This is not a trace of the past, but a living connection with it. Goosebumps…

You could describe it banally: people in Japan like to dress up roadside figurines. Only this is not dressing up. This is care clothed in gesture. Care that has no ambition to solve suffering, but knows how to stand beside it. And that is a huge difference — especially when you touch subjects that cannot be “fixed”: fear for a child walking alone to school, and fear for a child who has “gone” somewhere we can no longer catch up with. That most painful loss.

From that fork we go farther and begin to see Jizō differently. Not as a single figure, but as something that likes boundaries: the edges of roads, crossings between districts, the vicinity of cemeteries, riverbanks, places where the terrain turns stony.

A few minutes later we come upon a small hokora by the roadside — “Shōgun Jizō Daibosatsu” (将軍地蔵大菩薩), sometimes also called Shōgun Jizō-dō.

Hokora (祠) is a small, simple shrine — usually wooden or stone — set by a road, at the edge of a field, by a house, on the boundary of a village, or in a temple corner. It is not a temple, but rather a point in the landscape, with a little roof, with stone, with small offerings. Something you pause at in passing — and precisely in that passing lies its meaning.

We step closer and see the same everyday economy of the sacred that is so movingly simple throughout Japan: coins (sometimes literally small change, as if someone left Jizō pocket money), a bucket of water or a bottle, sometimes a bowl, sometimes flowers. Water carries more weight here than anything material: it is a gesture that says, “I am here,” “I remember,” “I stopped for a moment.” In a world where pain is intensified by loneliness, even a brief ritual can restore a person’s bond with something — or someone.

But what strikes you most are those things too small and too soft to belong to stone: knitted caps, bibs, sometimes tiny toys. Some people pass by and see “cute details.” But if you look longer, you begin to understand that this is not cute. “Cute” is not the word that forces itself to your lips if you stare long enough… Because someone who puts a bib on Jizō. Puts it on because in that gesture lives what cannot be said plainly. It expresses feelings for which our languages have no words. Tenderness does not end with the biological possibility of care. You can still feed the world with an instinct of concern, even if the heart wants to howl with pain.

The stone under your fingers is cool, the cap’s fabric rough, the coin heavy like proof that someone has been here. And suddenly Jizō stops being a folkloric curiosity — he becomes a way people handle a boundary. The boundary of the road. The boundary of life. The boundary of memory.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

What is Jizō?

In Japan, Jizō is not a “figurine” in the sense of decoration, even if sometimes he stands in a garden as if he were part of a composition of stone and moss. He is rather a relationship: a quiet agreement between human helplessness and someone who is meant to stand at the boundary and not look away. According to Buddhist monks, a bosatsu (bodhisattva) is “closer to people” than the Buddha — he walks the same roads, stands beside you, stays near the ground; and among bodhisattvas, Jizō is often felt as “the closest.” And “closest” does not mean “most exalted,” but most accessible: for children, for the poor, for those whose shoulders life has crushed, and for the dead who — in religious imagination — may get stuck in places of passage.

Everything is already in the name. 地蔵: 地 (ji) is earth, ground, what is under your feet — everydayness without metaphysics. 蔵 (zō) is a storehouse, a treasury, a repository: something that receives and holds without reproaching. This “earthly treasury” forms the image of a merciful and “grounded” deity, protective toward all beings. Jizō’s most important feature is precisely familiarity, friendliness, accessibility to the prayers of ordinary people. It is a fascinating paradox: a name with great weight (“the earth’s treasury!”) ends up in practice in a roadside ditch, in a small shrine, in the hand of a child saying, “good morning, o-Jizō-sama.”

Suffering, especially the most intimate kind, rarely goes to abstraction. It goes to someone who has a face. To someone who does not intimidate. So what do Jizō statues look like?

Most often they are not tall — sometimes up to an adult’s knees, sometimes barely to the ankles — as if deliberately not meant to dominate the landscape, only to remain within it. The stone is often softly worn by rain: cheeks rounded, mouth barely marked, eyes sometimes just a “line” under the lid. Some Jizō have a monk’s face: calm, ageless, with an expression that doesn’t so much “smile” as simply refrain from judging in a friendly way. On the head there may be a gently suggested tonsure, on the shoulders a robe falling in heavy folds — folds which, when seen up close, are like the record of a chisel from generations ago: simple cuts, later smoothed by hands and weather, until they become something between sculpture and the natural shaping of rock.

In the hands he often holds attributes that reveal “who he is” even when the face has nearly vanished: a monk’s staff with metal rings (shakujō), sometimes barely legible, and a spherical wish-fulfilling jewel (nyoihōju), sometimes like a smooth pebble pressed to the chest.

Here it is worth returning for a moment to what we saw on the road: caps, bibs, water. The more I dug into books, the more I have to admit that researchers, honestly, acknowledge that we know less about the origin of the red bibs than we would like. What is interesting is that Jizō is now a living tradition, yet about the origins of many details we know nothing anymore.

There are certain hypotheses: a link to depictions of children in Sai no Kawara, and also the symbolism of red as a color joining the blood of death with the blood of rebirth; there is also a lead connected to the practice “kawa segaki / arai zarashi,” in which cloth stained with blood after a death in childbirth was given to the river’s current, so that “whitening” could become a sign of rescue from punishment. Even if it cannot be resolved definitively, the meaning remains readable: Jizō stands at the point where women’s experience, children’s fragility, and mourning meet the need for purification and soothing.

In Japan we encounter Jizō under many names — not as “different deities,” but as different responses to human fragility. Enmei Jizō (延命) for “prolonging life,” migawari Jizō (身代わり) as “substitute,” taking misfortune upon himself, Mizuko Jizō (水子) in the experience of loss (miscarriage, loss of a child), Roku Jizō (六地蔵) in reference to the six realms of existence.

If I had to say as briefly as possible who Jizō “really” is, I would say this: he is a bodhisattva with the rare ability to be close without imposing himself. He is present beside what is shameful, painful, inexpressible. He does not solve life like an equation, but helps carry it a little farther — sometimes as a great theological promise, and sometimes as a bucket of water and a thin knitted cap. And perhaps that is why Japan so readily sets him in places where a person is only a passerby: on the road, by a low wall, at the edge of a cemetery. Because in a deeper sense, we are all passersby here.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

Beliefs behind the Jizō statue

There is a story in Japan that explains why, beside a stone Jizō, we so often see things soft and small: a knitted cap, a red bib, sometimes a toy. It is called Sai no kawara (賽の河原) — the “stony riverbank” on the other side, a liminal place, where everything is as if unfinished. In this vision, children who die too early do not simply go “somewhere far away.” They remain in a space of passage: too small to cross on their own, yet carrying within them the weight of their parents’ pain. And therefore their task is simple and cruelly meaningful at once: they stack stones into little mounds — stupas — day after day, as if building, out of small gestures, something they can offer their parents as merit.

In the evening, oni demons come — not so much “monsters from a horror film” as the embodiment of the merciless force that keeps knocking things down in human life: effort, hope, freshly erected meaning. The demons scatter the piles, shout, humiliate the children. And then Jizō appears — not like a stern judge, but like someone who can be a parent in a place where there are no parents. In popular telling, Jizō speaks gently to the children, calms them, takes some in his arms, hides others in the folds of his robe, and still others walk beside him holding to his staff. This is a very Japanese image: suffering does not vanish, but it is wrapped in presence. Love does not “fix” death — yet it does not allow death to be everything.

It is worth noticing how this story works psychologically — without theatricality, yet with a piercing logic. A parent after a painful loss carries something like an unfinished gesture: an instinct to protect that can no longer be fulfilled. Sai no kawara gives that instinct a form. The bib and the cap are then not decoration but a language of care: “don’t be cold,” “may someone hold you,” “don’t go alone.” “O-Jizō-sama, please pass on this cap I sewed for my little Hanako — let her not freeze.”

So if you see a small Jizō by the road in a red cap, it is not because Japan “likes cute details.” It is rather a subtle way to say something very serious without shouting: even if the child is gone, the relationship does not disappear. And that in a country that can so delicately braid everydayness with the sacred, you can leave something soft by a stone — and in that one gesture contain more mourning, love, and responsibility than could fit in a long prayer.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

Jizō and mizuko — a ritual that does not stop pain

On Zenrin-gai in Hirosaki — that quiet street of temples, where gravestones stand densely like pages in an old book — there is a small hokora in front of one of the main halls. Inside: not one statue but dozens of small, colored stone Jizō, usually twenty to thirty centimeters tall. Outside, a banner flutters with a direct inscription: “奉納子育水子地蔵菩薩” — “offering, raising children, mizuko, bodhisattva Jizō.” And this place, though it looks inconspicuous, is like a quiet language for speaking of the hardest matters: of children who did not manage to become part of the world, and of mothers left with love that has no addressee.

The word mizuko is written as 水子 — literally “water child.” The concept also includes loss of pregnancy: miscarriage, stillbirth, abortion — and it is sometimes extended to children who died very early. The practice of commemoration itself is called mizuko kuyō: kuyō (供養) originally means “to feed, to provide nourishment,” and in religious everyday life it is simply “a ritual in honor of the dead.” This language is precise: it is not about “justice” or “explanation,” but about feeding a bond that can no longer be fed in any other way.

Many women come to such a place not because they have some ready doctrine within them, but because the pain after loss often mixes with something else: guilt, shame, fear that the “natural order” has been disturbed, the sense that the whole world has cracked and fallen apart. Mizuko kuyō is sometimes understood as a ritual that tries to restore order — not by canceling the past, but by symbolically bringing the relationship to an end that life did not leave time for.

Some interpretations also add an element of fear of tatari — the “vengeful retaliation” of a spirit — but in practice this is often more a psychological name for what a person carries when they cannot close their grief.

What does the ritual look like in the “classic” version, encountered in many temples? It usually begins simply: a woman asks a priest to perform a ceremony. It takes place in the main hall or in a space set aside for mizuko — sometimes in a separate “mizuko Jizōdō.” The priest recites sutras, voices the wish that the mizuko “become a Buddha,” and the participant makes offerings: incense, small items associated with an infant, sometimes food, sometimes a toy. What matters, however, is not the order of actions itself, but the fact that ritual gives a body to what inside is chaos: it allows you to do something concrete when in the heart there is nothing left you can “do.”

Then comes the moment every passerby sees: small Jizō in red bibs and caps. In field accounts, one detail repeats: a woman often buys a small figure — sometimes clearly “childlike” — dresses it and prays by it for forgiveness or peace; in other places, instead of a figure there appears an ihai (memorial tablet), as for ancestors. There is also a more “informal” variant: someone does not arrange a full service, but comes, leaves a bib on a larger Mizuko Jizō statue, and stands for a moment, as if asking for one thing: that Jizō help the child gather up the stones scattered by the oni demons.

All of this has its material side — and it varies greatly by region. In studies from Tsugaru, there appears almost a “market” for mizuko Jizō: stonemasons speak of two forms — funa (舟) jizō and maru (丸) jizō — with the latter being structurally more prone to damage around the neck.

A typical size is around “one shaku and two sun” in old measures (that is, roughly half a meter), and the price about 10,000 yen per figure; cheaper cement, painted ones may be available for four to five thousand, but they deteriorate faster in the sun. Even here there are superstitions that speak to the tension between economy and fate: some believe that carving several mizuko Jizō from a single stone (because it is cheaper) “is not good” and may bring further misfortune — so it happens that after a series of misfortunes a family returns and sets up separate figures after all.

In the same space, customs appear that show how “maternal care” can take the shape of a symbolic life that never happened. In Hirosaki, situations were recorded in which someone — on someone’s advice — brings to a temple a bride-doll in a box, gives it a name (e.g., “Kazuko”), and offers it “for a deceased boy,” as if wanting to provide him what he did not have time to have: a wife, a home, his turn in the human order. A monk then recites sutras. It may sound foreign, but psychologically it is very understandable: grief for a child often mourns not only death — it mourns an unlived life as well, all the roles and days that never came.

Sometimes, too, mizuko Jizō takes the form of an impressive “army of tenderness.” At the temple Shiunzan Jizō-ji we see a tall Mizuko Jizō by a path, with a shakujō staff in the right hand and an infant in the left; at his feet sit more children, reaching their hands toward him. And farther on — thousands of small Jizō arranged in a semicircle: various sizes, calm faces, red bibs and caps, hands joined in prayer. People sometimes dress them in rain ponchos, baseball jackets, scarves, sweaters — clothes so everyday they feel almost “too real” for ritual. And that is precisely the point: not distant holiness, but holiness that lets you bring into it a piece of your own life.

The Jizō figure serves various functions — but it is not a tool for “exoneration” or “justification.” He is someone before whom you can say what you cannot say to people. He is also, in a way, a “substitute parent” for the child and a “mediator” between mother and child — a bridge between pain and soothing.

This sounds abstract until we see how real this relationship is: a woman who comes alone, adjusts a cap on a small stone head, leaves water, then stands for a moment in silence. Not in order to forget. In order to go on living with a memory that does not tear her apart from within.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

In the north

In the north, in Tsugaru, Jizō ceases to be “someone’s private” and becomes communal — like a well, like a road, like wind that lashes the whole village. Imagine the edge of a settlement on a plain, where houses end abruptly and beyond there is only field, drainage ditches, and a rough line of trees. At the boundary stands a small jizōdō or hokora: a roof, a few stones, sometimes beside it an old stele with other “border” signs (in Tsugaru Jizō often stands near kōshin-type monuments, because it is the same way of thinking: protecting the boundary, warding off misfortune, guarding the passage).

And here we see something interesting: local tradition distinguished — and researchers long tried to systematize — two great “types” of Jizō. The first is the “boundary” Jizō, guardian of the community, placed on field lines and crossroads, meant to protect people and children, ward off disease, serve as a point for village-circling rituals and collective prayers; it was workingly called “sai-no-kami” / “賽の神型地蔵.” The second is Jizō built as a votive offering for those who left “too early” — for kanashii hotoke, “sad dead,” and especially for children — and this type was described as “死者供養型地蔵,” a strictly “mourning” Jizō, tied to memory and soothing.

The most beautiful thing is that in Tsugaru this distinction is not a dry typology, but a practice written into the calendar and into people’s hands. In many settlements, the “Jizō day” is considered the 23rd and 24th day of the old, lunar sixth month — and then they enter the scene: older women who know the village rhythm better than anyone. They bring offerings, open the small shrine doors, take out a bundle wrapped in cloth. In the region’s language, this new outfit has its own name: sendaku (センダク) — “clothing” for Jizō, changed as if for someone close.

Then comes a gesture that surprises an outsider: they whiten the statue’s face — as if applying o-shiroi, as if wanting to restore freshness, dignity, a “living” appearance. And at the end there is something very human and very concrete: shared food. The ritual does not end with prayer; it ends with sharing — because a community holds together not only by words, but by people sitting together, eating what they brought, and for a moment not being alone with their fears.

If you know what Tsugaru calls “kanashii” — “sad, pitiful” — you understand that beneath that whiteness and beneath that cloth there often lies an experience that cannot be smoothed over: a child who died, a young person who “didn’t make it in time,” a sudden departure. And yet here, at the edge of the village, grief does not have to close itself inside four walls. It can be shared through ritual and its rhythm: a day in the month, an outfit, whiteness, an offering, a common meal. This is not a denial of suffering — it is a way to keep suffering from turning a person into a lonely island. And, in my opinion, a powerful lesson for us Europeans.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

A small digression

Writings from Tsugaru remind us that Jizō was not always exclusively quiet and “cemetery-bound.” In one historical account, in the diary of a merchant* from the 19th century (from the circle of old Hirosaki), short, vivid notes appear that sound like snapshots of a town on a festival day: “yomiya” (夜宮). These were night observances at migawari Jizō — lanterns, a crowd, a buzz.

Once in Hirosaki: “I returned from the night festival of Jizō, it was lively, lanterns hung at the corner.” Another time in the port of Aomori: “yesterday in Chaya-machi the night festival of Jizō; by the riverbank boats with lanterns, people came in great numbers, very cheerful” — and the author adds that since it is festival time, he also went to Atago. This is an extraordinarily important testimony: even in the mid-19th century, Jizō in Tsugaru could be the axis of a joyful gathering, not only of whispered mourning. Life and memory did not stand on opposite sides — they stood next to each other, like two lights in one lantern.

*This refers to “金木屋日記” (“Kanagiya Nikki,” “Diary of the Kanagiya house/firm”) — and the “merchant” in this source is 金木屋（屋号山一）又三郎敬之 (Kanagiya Matasaburō Takayuki), i.e. 武田又三郎敬之 (Takeda Matasaburō Takayuki).

And in the margins of the diary appears a detail I especially remember: the author sees girls walking and singing — something like wasany, religious songs — and writes with disarming honesty that he “doesn’t understand the words at all.” They probably didn’t understand everything in an academic sense either. It was very old Japanese, even for people a century ago. But they understood the rhythm. They understood when one goes, to whom one sings, why one sings. The Kanagiya diary is full of such brief, yet strikingly realistic scenes and observations.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

Atago-ji

We descend back to Saga-Toriimoto in northern Sagano, to the stony stretch of the Atago-kaidō — that old pilgrimage road toward Atago-jinja: there have been so many words, and yet everything began with someone placing a stone by the road and returning to it from time to time.

Atago-kaidō, the old route toward Atago-jinja on Mount Atago, is today calm, somewhat “dimmed” — and perhaps that is why it fits Jizō so well. Your gaze catches on details you cannot see in haste: the roughness of a wall where green film settles, the narrow gutter along the road where, after rain, water stands like a thin mirror. And those eight figures — Hattai Jizō — which do not shout “look at me,” but stand like a quiet sign: “human matters pass through here, too.”

At the fork someone has again adjusted the cloth. The bib is fresher than the rest — washed, ironed, tied in a knot with such care as if it were a child’s neck, not cold stone. The cap has uneven stitches, hand-made, probably in the evening, by the television or by a window. Below, in the little channel at the statue’s feet, lie coins: the same small change you have in your pocket when you buy tea from a vending machine. In this lies the whole truth of Japanese “taming”: grief and care do not always come dressed in ceremonial robes. More often they come as a small gesture on the way home.

We walk on, and at last we stand again by the small hokora of Shōgun Jizō Daibosatsu — the one that looks like a fragment of landscape and yet like a window into history. In such a place it is easy to feel that the Japanese sacred is “close to the ground” not because it is less exalted, but because it is meant to guard the things that happen in our world: roads, fire, illness, birth, death. In the traditions linked with Atago Jizō, you can see how strongly Kyōto and its mountains were imagined as a zone of protection — and how naturally a bodhisattva, seemingly quiet, took on the roles of guardian, “warder-off,” protector.

And only here — by this same stone, in this same silence — does one understand something important: different cultures have different tools for softening pain, but most of them try to do one and the same thing. Give suffering a form, so that a person does not have to carry it as a formless mass. Some build language: words of prayer, formulas that “hold” what is falling apart. Others build space: a grave, a candle, a photograph. Japan — alongside all of that — very often builds a gesture. A gesture that can be repeated: pour water, adjust a cap, lay flowers, bow your head, and then… return to life without betraying memory.

Here it is worth taking a step sideways — to contemporary Japan after a catastrophe that remains under the eyelids for years. In a field report from Sendai, the jūshoku (chief priest) of one temple recalls that after the 2011 tsunami he set up by the temple cemetery — at the second entrance, beside the steps — a large, seated Jizō figure, about 165 cm tall, with a shakujō staff and nyoihōju, with a slightly exaggerated, “smiling” head so that people could learn, even for a moment, to breathe again. When later someone said that in the rain Jizō looks as if he were “crying,” the priest answered most simply: these are not tears of despair, but joy, because he is happy when someone comes — and thus the name “Naki Jizō,” “the Crying Jizō,” clung to him.

Beside him stand “Oyako Jizō” — parent and child — three smiling figures with hands joined in gasshō. The priest explains it without pathos: people lose parents, lose children, and visits to graves do not have to be only days of pain; they can be days of meeting, days of return, “days of reunion.” And this is what can surprise most in Japan: not the repression of suffering, but an attempt to preserve, inside suffering, a place for tenderness, for gratitude, for the simple “it’s good you are here, even if only in memory.”

So we return to Atago-kaidō, to our roadside Jizō, and suddenly we see that all these things — history, etymologies, mandalas, regional customs, modern tragedies — converge at one point: in a person who pauses for a moment. In one hand a coin, in the other a bottle of water. For a moment they touch the cap’s fabric, as if checking whether it holds well, whether it will not slip in the wind. And in that small action lies the whole “technology” of easing pain: not the promise that it will be easier, but the promise that you do not have to go through it alone.

And then we walk on. Downward, toward houses, toward the light between roofs, toward ordinary matters. The stone monk remains by the road — small, stubborn, patient.

Roadside Jizō in Japan: red bibs, knitted caps, coins, and water. An essay on the beliefs surrounding mizuko (‘water children’), Sai no Kawara, and how gestures soften the pain of loss.

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