Sadly (for me mostly), my vacation saga ends here, which means that I had to leave the whimsy of feudal Japan and return to the everyday rush of Tokyo. (Perhaps “whimsy” is a bad word for feudal Japan. But still, you get my point.) Kyoto is a great city, not only full of amazing historical sights, but also a safe-haven for artisans who feel their traditional ways would be looked down on or lost in the hubbub of Tokyo. There’s whole streets dedicated to the makers of tea cups, or a specific sort of fabric, the quality of which you could never hope find outside of the Western part of Japan.
I hope that through these past few posts, I’ve managed to communicate that Kyoto is not just interesting because it’s old;it’s interesting because of its reverence for the old. Most of Asia has this obsession with new and fast and better, and the rest of Japan outside Kyoto is no different. (I don’t say this as a generalization – I know the Western world is the same way. It’s just very severe and concentrated here.) All the Japanese kids want to go to Tokyo, and forget about the historical significance of the places they grew up in. Same with tourists – they’d rather see Harajuku and Akihabara than Nara or Nikko. But Kyoto has managed to retain its ability of seeing age as distinction.
In this post, through some of my pictures, I hope that I can show what this “reverence” is. Perhaps one could say that Kyoto can have this ideal because their city was preserved during WWII, while other cities were destroyed, forcing the building of new things and a shifting of perceptions. Not so much. In Tokyo, old businesses and restaurants do remain, but people would rather go to a new shop that just opened in a trendy part of town than to an old, Edo Period establishment.
So, let’s get started. First, the Imperial Palace of Kyoto, modeled after the Tang Dyanasty palace, meaning it’s pretty rocking in bright orange and white. It also has a couple impressive gardens, the most stunning of which I posted here.
Then, there’s Katsura Imperial Villa, which was started by a son of an Emperor who wasn’t going to inherit, so he went off and made himself a swinging bachelor pad. Or the equivalent of that in feudal Japan (lots of tea rooms, can I just say.)
The last place of note is Fushimi-Inari shrine, a giant temple to the famous god Inari, who uses foxes as his messengers. Inari is the guy (or girl, because the god is supposedly androgynous) to help you out with rice, agriculture and industry, so this shrine was built mainly by businessmen looking for a little bump. The complex stretches for miles up the mountainside with red gates erected by both old and current businesses who are looking for the god’s favor. Throughout Japan, you’ll see little shrines to Inari flanked by foxes with four or five sad little red gates leading up to it, but this complex kind of owns the hell out of all of those and ruins you for all future shrines.
And finally – eavesdropping on a Shinto ceremony! Being a nosy foreigner! And cherry blossoms too!
