Shinto Ghost-house

"Why certain architectural forms produce in the beholder a feeling of weirdness about which I should like to theorize some day: at present I shall venture only to say that Shinto shrines evoke such a feeling. It grows with familiarity instead of weakening; and a knowledge of popular beliefs is apt to intensify it. We have no English words by which these queer shapes can be sufficiently described – much less any language able to communicate the impression which they make. Those Shinto shrines which we loosely render by the words ‘temple’ and ‘shrine’ are really untranslatable; – I mean that the Japanese ideas attaching to them cannot be conveyed by translation.  The so-called ‘august house of the Kami’ is not so much a temple, in the classic meaning of the term, as it a haunted room, a spirit-chamber, a ghost-house – ghosts of great warriors and heroes and rulers and teachers, who lived and loved and died hundreds of thousands of years ago.  I fancy that to the Western mind the word ‘ghost-house’ will convey, better than such terms as ‘shrine’ and ‘temple’, some vague notion of the strange character of the Shinto miya or yashiro – containing in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols of tokens, the latter probably of paper. Now the emptiness behind the visored form is more suggestive than anything material could possibly be."
– Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, Vol VIII, p 4-5