After a pleasant, three-hour ride aboard a Shinkansen bullet train, we encountered one of Kyoto’s most famous hangouts, Nishiki Market, immediately upon exiting Kyoto Station. It’s a tough place to navigate with three bags each. Imagine a shopping mall at Christmastime, only most stores are street-food-style eateries. It’s narrow, overcrowded and an embarrassment of culinary riches, and I loved it — at least once we returned after checking into and dropping off our bags at Hotel Resol Trinity Kyoto. The problem isn’t finding something delicious to eat at Nishiki Market but rather choosing from over 100 inviting menus packed into one car-free quarter mile. Nishiki has been an official food market since Shakespeare was alive. You can see why it’s often called “Kyoto’s kitchen.” There’s a popular knife store, too, Aritsugu, which is named for its 16th-century swordsmith founder. We noshed on tempura prawns, cheese toast and four kinds of raw tuna. Amanda said it was the best tuna she’d ever eaten, and we probably should’ve purchased a full order each. As it is I kind of hogged it. Sorry, Amanda. Not that sorry, but sorry.
Kyoto was the imperial capital of Japan until the Meiji Restoration in 1868, which is why its name is Nihongo (Japanese) for “capital city.” (“Tokyo” means “eastern capital,” a vestige of the transfer of power from Kyoto to Edo during the same decade.) Depending on where you draw the city limits, it’s now home to anywhere from a million and a half to three and a half million people. I just learned it came within a hair’s breadth of filling Nagasaki’s tragic slot in the “nuked by Americans” sweepstakes. Kyoto was also ignored in major Allied bombing raids, so it boasts a lot of beautiful, prewar, traditional architecture. Simply walking around it yields a sense of experiencing “the real Japan.”
We arose before dawn Wednesday morning to venture an hour away to Arashiyama Bamboo Grove. This place is Instagram-famous for good reason, if you get there early enough that your photos have more bamboo than tourists in them. Prompt as we were, I think we just beat the crowds. The forest covers over six square miles, but its paths felt shorter than I expected, the city around the grove more present than I would’ve preferred. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful place, but in person it lacks that off-the-beaten-path feel you might be expecting. Those photos you’ve seen on social media apply green filters and probably Photoshop-delete other travelers from the frame. The photo below is unretouched.
Conversely, a visit to Kyoto’s Imperial Palace is more time-consuming than I expected, despite the fact that its grounds cover only a third of a square mile. We seemed to walk for hours before locating the secluded palace itself. That’s OK, though; visitors aren’t allowed inside. Come for the relaxing gardens, which do feel like an escape from the urban sprawl.
I succeeded at something ambitious that day, which was to visit both Kinkaku-ji and Ryoan-ji Temples (Guess what ji means!) during the afternoon golden hour. Kinkaku-ji, Japanese for Golden Pavilion Temple, was made for pastel lighting. Its two upper floors are coated in gold leaf. As is too common in Japan, it’s a midcentury reconstruction of a Zen temple first constructed in 1399. This time, however, the culprit wasn’t Allied forces but a lone, schizophrenic, arsonist monk. Now the temple appears to hover over a mirror pond that echoes its upturned eaves and mathematically pleasing proportions.
You may be wondering why temple eaves are often upturned that way, and we were too so I’ll spare you the Google search. It turns out a building’s eaves protect its wooden foundation by redirecting rainwater in other directions. In this case, upturned eaves strike a balance between the contradictory priorities of sluicing excess water while allowing as much sunlight as possible into the building.
Ryoan-ji is also a Zen Buddhist temple, this time from the second half of the 15th century. It’s less picturesque than Kinkaku-ji but still a must-do thanks to its karesansui (“dry landscape”) rock garden. This is what most people think of when they hear the phrase “Zen garden,” with carefully raked gravel that resembles the ocean around miniature islands. Some say this particular garden is meant to represent tiger cubs swimming across a stream. In any case, it’s been a favorite of everyone from poets to mathematicians (who studied its tree-branch-like negative space) to composer John Cage, for whom it inspired series of both music and paintings. Because we arrived so close to sundown, the temple grounds closing around us, we were able to spend a fair amount of quality contemplation time enjoying the garden with just a few other visitors.
After rising just as early the next morning, we trekked to what is probably Kyoto’s most unmissable tourist location, Fushimi Inari-taisa. You may not be familiar with that name, but I bet you’ve seen the photos: a seemingly endless tunnel of bright-red, densely erected torii gates climbing into the mists of Mount Inari. Well, I’m here to tell you it does end, because I made it all the way to the top for an amazing view of Kyoto and a feeling of deep middle-aged physical accomplishment.
Flush with success, I elected to take the more rustic path down the mountain. I was rewarded with absolute tranquility — just me and the trees. Then more of just me and the trees. Then me and the trees again. Was I lost? No, there’s always the satellite salvation of Google Maps, but even so I found myself reaching ground level in a quiet neighborhood miles from the park entrance. I regrouped with Amanda one miles-long hike and two bus stops later. Kyoto’s Nintendo campus is nearby, which is how Fushimi Inari’s torii came to inspire game designer Shigeru Miyamoto (Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda) in his concepts for the classic space shooter Starfox. As for what it all means, Inari’s the kami (spirit) of rice and agriculture; its mascot is the fox. Guidebooks call Fushimi Inari-taisa the shrine with a “thousand gates,” but there are “only” a mere 800 or so up the two-and-a-half-mile ascent. They were placed here by companies and individual donors as symbols of gratitude to the kami. Torii are regarded as portals for kami and a transition point between mundanity and sacredness. For that reason, it’s sometimes traditional to bow as one passes through a torii, but don’t try that here or you’ll bob yourself into a dangerous dizzy spell.
Next we made a quick jaunt to the moated Nijo Castle, residence of the 17th-century Tokugawa shogunate. Its key structure, Ninomaru Palace, is famous for its wall paintings and “nightingale floors,” so called because, thanks to the design of their underlying nail-and-clamp structure, they chirp like birds when anyone walks on them. Historians believe those noises were unintentional at first but, aside from their adorable soundscape, they come in handy as a security measure: Neither spies nor assassins could sneak up on the shogun.
I wish I could remember the name of the restaurant we found for lunch that day, because it turned out to be owned and operated by a very nice lady who spoke barely any English and made us okonomiyaki (savory pancake skillets) from whatever ingredients she found in her fridge. Until a young guy who was either a daily regular or relative came in, we were her only two customers. Our chat while she cooked, aided by Google Translate, was even lovelier than the meal. Don’t be afraid to find restaurants on Google in Japan. The locals are notoriously stingy with their praise, so any eatery rated higher than 3.5 is probably a banger. Our experience here was one of those unexpected travel treats that help us realize no one is really all that foreign once you share quality time where they’re most comfortable. (P.S.: Amanda pointed out the geotag on a photo she’d taken in front of the restaurant, so I was able to identify the restaurant as Fukue Teppanyaki near Nijo Castle. Highly recommended!)
Emboldened by my success the day before, I timed our visit to Gion, the hilltop geisha district, for sundown on Thursday. It’s a stunning neighborhood marked by the machiya (townhouse) architecture popular a thousand years ago. Kyoto has honored this by removing even electric streetlamps from the area so, despite throngs of locals and tourists, you really do get the sensation of time travel as darkness falls. That continues as you work your way down the hill into the Ponto-cho entertainment district, an evocative tangle of interesting restaurants and pub-crawl alleys.
As for the geisha and their apprentices, called geiko and maiko respectively in western Japan, they still exist and work as entertainers today. When I say entertainers, I mean dancers, storytellers, singers and other presentational styles. Historically there was a fair amount of overlap between those historic geisha specialties and the sex work professionally offered by courtesans, but 19th-century courtesans resented geishas’ intrusion into their business and demanded they stay in their traditional lanes. Present-day geisha charge hanadai, “flower fees,” a flat rate per hour, for entertaining visitors to traditional teahouses. While some visitors to Gion enjoy cosplaying as geisha, legitimate geiko sightings are rare outside those professional settings.
We made our last Kyoto stop at Kiyomizudera the next morning; it’s a Buddhist temple perched on a hilltop that’s been regarded as sacred for at least 1,200 years. That’s right, people have been worshipping here for a millennium longer than America has even been a country. Legend has it that if you make a wish here, then jump off the balcony and survive your 43-foot tumble down the hillside, your wish will be granted. Unfortunately, unless your wish is “I hope to die this morning in a tangle of broken, bloody limbs,” your odds of success have historically maxed out at 85% or so. This practice has been banned since 1872; yet even so, to this day “jump off the porch at Kiyomizu” is Kyoto’s idiomatic equivalent to the Western expression “take the plunge.” We passed on the entry fee for another local superstition, which holds that drinking from one or two of three channels of the Otoma-No-Taki Falls will grant either true love, financial success or longevity (but never all three). After promising news from the omikuji we drew back in Tokyo, we saw no sense in excessive greed.
Besides, we had places to be and another bullet train to wrestle our bags aboard. On to Osaka!
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