Beauty

Last Friday a group of us visited a garden in Kagoshima. It is on the grounds of the Satsuma family's residence. They are the ones who started the Meiji Restoration. If you have seen the movie "The Last Samurai" it was set in that time period and the samurai leader in the movie was inspired by the Satsuma family's retainer, Saigo Takamori. Ok, I'm done being a history nerd, or writing about it at least.

The garden contains a very old shrine dedicated to some goddess of beauty or something like that. Legend has it that if a woman visits this shrine her beauty will increase, or she will become beautiful if she is more on the ugly side of things. We gave it a shot and as you can see it works very well, the before and after pictures should prove this. (Note: The comparison would have been more drastic if I could have got the Japanese girls to stop smiling, they couldn't stop laughing.)


Us men even felt more manly upon entering the grounds.

Amazing isn't it?!