...here is a more unusual one: during the war years, there was a program called gakudo sokai (学童疎開) and was about evacuating big city schools with the children moving to the countryside so they would escape the bombings. The area near Mt. Oyama was one such evacuation site for Kawasaki schools and the monument is commemorates the 40 years from the end of the war and also the end of that program --hence the school children. Next to it, a secondary shrine of the Tenmangu (天満宮) variety, dedicated to Sugawara no Michizane (菅原 道真, 845-903) a Heian Period (794-1185) intellectual worshipped as the god/kami of learning with the name Tenjin (天神). Such shrines can be found all over Japan and they are considered good places to pray for academic success.
(For a bigger version of this picture both in color and black and white, check my "Japan Arekore 2" set on Flickr).
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