Zenkoji Temple in Nagano: The High Priestess and the Bumbling Idiot

I’m never at my best first thing in the morning. We’d woken early at our temple lodgings in the Zenkoji temple complex in Nagano. The accommodation in the two-storey wooden house had been basic but the hospitality typically warm. Fearful that the winter nights in such an old place would be uncomfortably cold I’d packed the warmest nightwear I could gather, only to find that as in the modern hotels in which we’d stayed elsewhere in Japan, cold weather outside mean…