A number of dragons howled on top of a paifang in Seitenkyu, which was built in authentic Taiwanese style

Seitenkyu Temple built in authentic Taiwanese style

In Taiwan, every Taoist temple has a steady stream of worshippers. Even if the temple is not famous, there are worshippers, and most of them pray earnestly, some even throwing Poe objects repeatedly to read their fortunes. Some of them even carry shopping bags when they visit the temple, and you can feel that the temple has become a part of the everyday life of the citizens. Compared to such a situation, Seitenkyu, a Taiwanese Taoist temple in Sakado, Saitama, has no such smell of daily life. The construction materials and craftsmen were brought in from Taiwan to build this authentic Taoist temple, and while the hardware is authentic, the software, the worshippers, are not. This was inevitable. Most of the worshippers, including myself, were not familiar with the Taoist way of worship. When I went to the front of the main hall, I had to ask the attendant to show me how to pray.

I had assumed that the reason why the Taoist temple was located in Sakado, Saitama (and far from the station) and not in Shin-Okubo, Tokyo or Chinatown, Yokohama, where many people are familiar with Taoism, was because it was built in his hometown by a Taiwanese who made his fortune in Japan, but it is interesting to note that this is not the case. The person who built the shrine was a Taiwanese merchant who was born in Taiwan and made his fortune doing business in mainland China, and had nothing to do with Sakado. When he fell seriously ill, he made a wish at Zhinan Temple in Taipei and was completely cured. It is a fairy tale that a man with no connection to Sakado followed the oracle and built an authentic Taiwanese-style temple here in modern Japan.

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