Kyoto
If you go to only one place in Japan, Kyoto
should be it. Beyond the nondescript high-rises around Kyoto Station
hides the Japan of your imagination: a place where you'll see geisha
glide past 17th-century teahouses in Gion's narrow alleys; where you can
imagine the lives of court nobility at the Imperial Palace; where you
can seek contemplation in Ryoanji's Zen rock gardens and under billowing cherry trees on the Philosopher's Path. If Tokyo is the door to Japan's future, Kyoto is a window on its mysterious past.
Things to Do
Slip back to Kyoto's age of empires, wandering the moat-ringed gardens of the Imperial Palace and contemplating Nijo Castle's delicate cypress-wood carvings. The spirit of old Kyoto seeps through UNESCO-listed Gion's
cobblestone alleys, where geisha flit past like colorful butterflies.
Late afternoon is the best time to enjoy the meditative calm of Ryoanji's rock garden, and the sun gleaming on the Golden Pavillion. Clouds of cherry blossom draw couples to the canalside Philosopher's Path in spring.
Shopping
Kyoto is Japan's craft capital, where skills are still passed down through generations. Tiny specialty shops in Shijo Dori, Kawaramachi Dori and the Kyoto Handicraft Center deal in Yuzen-dyed fabrics to wooden combs, fans and everything you need to host a tea ceremony. Shinmonzen Dori and Furumonzen Dori are peppered with antique shops and galleries selling woodblock prints. The department stores around Shijo-Kawaramachi intersection and Kyoto Station are good bets for lacquerware and kimono.
Nightlife and Entertainment
For the Kyoto of kimono-clad geisha and ochaya (teahouses), head to the traditional pleasure quarter of Gion, where puppetry and court music are kept alive on Gion Corner. Nearby sits the delightfully ornate Minamiza Kabuki Theatre, the fabled birthplace of kabuki, highly stylized classical Japanese dance-drama. Take your pick of the buzzing bars and clubs tucked down the narrow alleys of Pontocho and Kiyamachi.Higashiyama-ku's after-dark scene skips from British pubs to sleek cocktail bars playing jazz.
Restaurants and Dining
Kyoto provides a range of unique dining experiences -- from eating lip-numbing fugu (pufferfish) in traditional restaurants to shojin ryori (vegetarian cooking) in the tranquil gardens of a Buddhist temple. Follow Higashiyama-ku's red lanterns to lively yakitori-ya, specializing in grilled chicken skewers. For tofu dishes and perfect noodles, head to Kita-ku's bars, some housed in converted sake warehouses. Book well in advance for Hyotei, an exquisite 300-year-old teahouse set in maple-shaded gardens, where kaiseki ryori, seasonally inspired Japanese cuisine, is artistically presented in lacquered bowls.
Now Is the Season(Spring) for Japan
Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times
The view from Kiyomizu temple, one of 1,600 temples in Kyoto.
By PICO IYER
Published: March 22, 2012 Comment
ONE bright early spring morning this month, I took myself to Ryoanji, the Kyoto
temple that is home to the world’s most celebrated rock garden. There
was not a single other foreigner in the place. Not even many Japanese
were visible across the 120-acre compound (I’d scheduled my trip for
spring break, when clamorous school tours are less in evidence).
Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times
Kosuke Okahara for The New York Times
Visitors at the famous rock garden at Ryoanji, a Kyoto temple.
So as I sat above the enigmatic presentation of 15 rocks, arranged with
seeming randomness across a wide bed of raked sand, I could hear nothing
but bird song from the cherry trees around me. A trickle of water from a
thin bamboo chute issued into a stone basin around the corner,
deepening as it intensified the silence. The characters around the basin
said, “What you have is all you need.”
Stillness, spaciousness and undistractedness are what I had just then. Though foreign tourism to Japan
as a whole plunged by 50 percent in the three months following the
earthquake last March, as of January 2012 it was only 4 percent lower,
according to the Japan National Tourism Organization.
Nevertheless, the quiet amplitude that is one of the special graces of
Japan has a new resonance this year. On the surface, the country that
greets someone arriving from San Francisco
or New York tomorrow is startlingly similar to the place you would have
seen two years ago, despite last year’s catastrophe. But deep down,
Japan seems more vulnerable, and thus more wide open, than ever.
The 9.0 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown that hit the country on
March 11, 2011, claimed almost 20,000 lives, overturned an economy that
had already been foundering through 20 years of recession, and
demoralized a citizenry dealing with one suicide every 17 minutes, a
loss of direction, and what is now seven prime ministers in fewer than
six years.
Yet it also highlighted the resilience, self-possession and
community-mindedness that are so striking in Japan; suddenly, the
country that had seemed to insist on its difference from the rest of the
world could be seen in its more human, compassionate and brave
dimensions. Japan has long been what the globally savvy magazine Monocle
called, in a recent issue, “The World’s Most Charming Nation”; now it is also one of those most grateful for visitors.
To put it another way: On a typical day this month — the anniversary of
the tsunami, as it happens — you could see huge illuminated flower
arrangements in Kyoto’s central Maruyama Park,
while candles were sent floating down a nearby stream; you could join
kimonoed women in following a path of 2,500 lanterns along the eastern
hills of the ancient capital, and watch maiko, or apprentice geisha,
performing ceremonial dances, free, at Yasaka Shrine. You could take a
train and bus out to the stunning I. M. Pei-designed Miho Museum,
which sits alone in a huge deserted natural park 70 minutes from Kyoto
Station, complete with its own space-age tunnel for an entrance; or you
could join 15,000 others in running Kyoto’s first marathon.
Meanwhile, all around, the qualities that have long made Japan
distinctive, and often humbling, are everywhere apparent. At the
airport, cabbies jump out of their cars to help load the trunks of the
taxis in front of them. In convenience stores, yellow-haired girls with
ghostly eye shadow prove as disarmingly helpful and polite as recent
finishing-school graduates. On March 3 this year, as every year,
families nibbled on diamond-shaped rice cakes with pink and white and
green layers and sent straw dolls floating down a stream in honor of
Hina Matsuri, Girls’ Day.
Over the 25 years I’ve been living around Kyoto, I’ve seen the city of
1,600 temples grow ever more festive, international and colorful. True,
shameless developers continue to tear down wooden buildings to make room
for ugly concrete blocks, and the narrow traffic lanes are increasingly
crowded with cars.
Yet in other ways, the heart of Japanese culture is ever younger and
hipper; its student culture (there are 38 centers of higher learning
around Kyoto) was evident this month in improvised dance performances
and art shows around downtown; new design hotels are appearing with
every season; and temples now throw open their gates after nightfall so
you can walk through illuminated wonder worlds in the dark.
Kyoto is still the ancestral home of the tea ceremony and kimono and Zen
meditation; but it’s also a uniquely stylish place housing Japan’s
first manga museum, a 15-story futuristic cube of a train station and the headquarters of Nintendo.
Signs are now in English (they weren’t when I arrived), as are
announcements on trains and buses. The strong yen makes prices 50
percent higher for those carrying dollars than they were five years ago,
but Japan is still less expensive than Britain or much of Northern
Europe, especially if you use a Japan Rail Pass and are careful about
where you stay (a pizza at my local coffee shop costs less than $5 — no
taxes or tips to worry about — and a can of high-end cappuccino from a
vending machine, $1.50). Most of all, Japan remains less like anywhere
else than anywhere else I know.
NONE of this is to deny the horror of last year’s catastrophes. When I
visited Sendai, the northern city closest to the epicenter of the
earthquake, four months ago, I found the downtown area as bustling and
brightly lighted as ever. But only 40 minutes away by car were harrowing
scenes: pieces of laundry hanging outside completely gutted houses;
gravestones toppled over.
That same month I visited the nearby fishing
village of Ishinomaki, laid waste by the tsunami, with the Dalai Lama,
and even this generally imperturbable leader of the Tibetans could not
hold back his tears. Around the Fukushima nuclear plant, when I went
there in October, stores were shuttered and streets bare save for
workers from the plant killing time in pinball arcades or deserted
three-table tearooms where the Beach Boys were singing “I Get Around,”
again and again.
Yet even there, at a resort hotel barely an hour from the nuclear plant, the breakfast room was packed with eager golfers from Tokyo waiting to hit the first nine at dawn, in the pelting rain.
It’s hard for outsiders to appreciate how much, after more than a
thousand years of fires and earthquakes and wars, Japan is primed for
adversity. Its people are notably cautious and prudent, but they’re not
given to wasted emotion. My Japanese wife, Hiroko, whose family comes
from Hiroshima, saw her first grandchild born in Yokohama
last year only to face a nuclear meltdown barely 150 miles away when
the baby was all of 2 weeks old. Take sensible precautions, Hiroko told
her son, but remember that nowhere will be entirely safe.
The boy who grew up next to us sent his own infant daughter — and wife — to live in Osaka, 250 miles from his Tokyo flat, but he continues to work in the capital, 130 miles from the nuclear plant.
Visitors today can therefore enjoy all of Japan’s beauties,
undiminished, while also offering moral and even practical support. A Discover Tohoku Tour
is offering four- or six-day excursions to the places of beauty near
the center of last year’s tragedy, among them the classic island-dotted
bay around Matsushima and the World Heritage site temples of Hiraizumi.
This month one of the many new low-cost airlines coming to Japan, Peach
Aviation, takes to the skies with trips from Osaka to faraway Sapporo
for less than $60, a sixth of what a train might cost.
In Mitsuyo Kakuta’s “Pieces,” perhaps the subtlest and most beautiful story in “March Was Made of Yarn,”
an anthology of short fiction just published in memory of last year’s
disasters, a woman in middle age looks back on her life after she learns
that her husband had been with a young mistress at the time of the
Great Tokyo Blackout.
“To acquire was not to be happy,” she had learned during Japan’s boom
years, and now she sees that “loss was not the root of unhappiness.” As
lights come back to her city, she reflects that the happy moments in her
life cannot erase the losses she’s known; nor can those losses ever
keep her from knowing happiness.
To hold those two ideas in your head as many in Japan do — to see that
life means a joyful participation in a world of sorrows, and that
suffering is not the same as unhappiness — is one of the singular
blessings this seasoned country still has to offer.
Paper cherry blossoms are fluttering above the stalls leading to the
great Kannon Temple in the Asakusa district of Tokyo right now, and in
the eighth-century capital of Nara, girls are carrying parasols under
the plum blossoms to shield their faces from the bright spring sun.
Todaiji is home to Japan's largest Buddha statue, right, erected in 752.
Credit: Torin Boyd/Polaris for The New York Times
- Article: Happy 1,300th to Nara, Japan
- Travel Guide: Nara
Kiyomizu Temple
The Kiyomizu temple also known as the Kiyomizu-dera or Otowa-san Kiyomizu-dera is considered as a sovereign Buddhist temple situated in the eastern part of Kyoto. The architecture was first constructed during the early part of the Heian period and is believed to date back on the year 768. The most remarkable thing about the construction of this temple is that not a single nail is used upon building it. Its name is derived from the waterfall inside its complex making it also known as clear water or pure water temple. The main hall of the temple houses a large veranda with tall pillars as its foundation that protrudes over the side of the building giving a beautiful view of the city. This style of having large verandas as well as main halls in temple designs was done in order to accommodate some huge numbers of pilgrims in it.
Just underneath the main hall is the famous Otowa waterfall where three channels of waterways fall together in one pond. Visitors of the Kiyomizu temple can drink these waters which are believed to possess some miraculous therapeutic powers. These waters are also said to be powerful enough to bring longevity, health, and wisdom to whoever drinks it. However, an ancient belief of the Japanese tells that it is morally right to choose only two of these options because people who are greedy enough to take three of the offered gifts will only cast misfortune upon themselves.
The Kiyomizu temple complex also houses some other shrines like the Jishu shrine is built in honor of the god of love, Okuninushi. Found inside a shrine is a pair of “love stones” set to ground 18 meters apart. Visitors looking for good luck in love matters can only walk between it with their eyes closed. If a person was able to reach the other stone, it means that he/she will soon find true love. Other offerings of the temple are talismans, omikuji, or paper fortunes and incense.
Our Stay in Kyoto:
Hotel Granvia Kyoto
901 Higashi Shiokojicho, Shimogyo-ku | JR Kyoto Station Karasuma-Central Entrance, Kyoto, Kyoto Prefecture 600-8216, Japan
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