Welcome to Aaron Menke's Cabinet of Curiosity's, a production of IHeart Radio and grim and mild.

Our world is full of the unexplainable.

And if history is an open book, all of these amazing tales are right there on display, just waiting for us to explore.

Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosity's.

Japan is known for many things, samurai and beautiful castles, cherry blossoms and

Mount Fuji. It's a very distinctive nation that has stayed that way in part due to a roughly

200-year isolationist period, which kept outsiders outside and the Japanese inn.

Nowadays, that isolationist streak is long past, and Japan is a commercial powerhouse. They're known for their massive

corporations that export all kinds of goods all over the world. Look around you right now,

and you'll probably see an electronic device, car, camera, or other piece of machinery manufactured in Japan.

But any nation is an amalgamation of its past and its present, and the intersection of Japan's

history and the modern world, can be very curious, such is the case at Okuna Kean Cemetery

on Montcoyah in southern central Japan.

Mount Coya is a temple settlement, said to have been

founded in 819 by Kobodashi, an ancient Buddhist monk. Some refer to him as the eastern

Leonardo da Vinci, due to his many contributions across a variety of disciplines, including

calligraphy, poetry, and philosophy. And he is also the founder of Japanese esoteric Buddhism, which is a Buddhist sect wherein the monks

orally pass on instruction through the generations using a variety of nature-based wisdom.

They compare a clouded mind to the different phases of the moon, for example.

Like many Buddhists, they're also vegetarians

and do not believe in the taking of life. Kobodashi was so renowned that when he passed away,

he was sealed in a tomb instead of cremated. This was so that he could continue to meditate on what

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