Kyoto to the mizznax pt. I

Currently, I’m onboard a bus to Seoul; I’m about two weeks behind in stories on my blog, so I’m going to start including multiple days of travelling per entry, organized by city.

So, where last we left off, I was in Kyoto, having marveled at its pine-lined labyrinthine secrets, but not actually doing all that much.

So the next morning, I get up at a reasonable time, check out, and head to the hostel I THOUGHT I was supposed to check into the previous day, K’s House. K’s House is a chain of hostels thru Japan, and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised if they expand beyond Japan at some point, as it has already established itself as a force of nature in the world of hostelling, and has a sixth location in Japan opening soon. Most likely it would add another few locations in Japan first, especially on the other islands of Hokkaido (most famous amongst gaijin (foreigners) for Sapporo, the city that lends its name to the only really well known Japanese beer in other countries), which is the island just north of the main island of Japan (that island, by the way, is called Honshu), and Kyushu, which is the island just south of the southwesternmost tip of Honshu.

Anyway, so I checked in there, and dropped my stuff off, and got ready for a big day of sightseeing. Kyoto is home to most of Japan’s most highly celebrated temples and the like; the biggest and best-est are all gathered right here, and most of them are in a specific district of Kyoto, as well, making it awfully convenient for a tourist to check out the big name stuff in one day. Most of these sights are found in Eastern central Kyoto, just across a river that vertically bisects the city into two halves; this river cuts directly through the geisha districts in the very middle of town. Most likely, it is because of this river that the geisha districts are located where they are; ambience is everything, after all.

Here's a picture of the river:

My itinerary for the day was simple enough: go geisha hunting, which was east of my hostel anyway, then continue east, and hit up those big name tourist traps, hang a left to go north to see a bunch of others of the same variety, then hang another left to go west towards the Imperial palace, which I’d check out if I had the opportunity. Afterwards, I’d go back to the hostel, whatever time it was, wash up, and evaluate, depending on how much time I had left in the rest of the day, and how exhausted I was from that day’s adventures.

Walking a bunch might not seem like the sort of thing that can resort in a lot of exhaustion on a typical day, but this place is frickin’ hot. Like, really, really hot and humid. And the sun just doesn’t quit. So, it’s pretty brutal after a few hours, especially after going up and down a lot of stairs; apparently, a good temple isn’t complete without a foreboding set of stairs or three.

So, to give away the ending, I succeeded at all of these things. What follows now is mostly a pictorial representation of the first half of the day, with explanations.

So this here is a few pictures of a geisha. There’s a high chance that anyone you see on a given day in the area dressed like a geisha is not in fact a geisha, however, there was no mistaking it with this one. The way she walked, and the way she moved in general, combined with the deferential respect that a lot of the people on this street treated her with, showed that she was different; a person playing around for the day wouldn’t be able to accomplish that.

And that was the interesting thing; there were quite a few other people on the street, all things considered; compared to most other streets, it was basically barren, but for this kind of street, the kind that evokes a past from long ago that refused to be forgotten, having a handful of people seems like a stampede. It was mostly women, but not entirely; those who greeted the geisha, as I recall, were all women, however.

This picture in particular doesn’t need much explanation, but I was captivated by the moment nevertheless; something about the little girl in thoroughly modern clothing, conversing for a minute or two with a geisha, was utterly entrancing. I was tempted to take a closer picture of the proceedings, but to be honest, I was just too damned shy.

I don’t know exactly what the protocol is with dealing with geishas, and I didn’t really want to do any disrespect. I don’t know if men are allowed to/supposed to talk to them, on the streets, so I didn’t want to make any faux pas in that regards, but at the same time, I don’t for even a moment think that taking pictures from afar is all that respectful either; it was scary in a way, or at least rife with anxiety, so I took the easiest path out, by taking pictures from a far enough distance that I wouldn’t be directly infringing upon her daily life, but close enough that I could still get a good feel for what was going on.

The other women that are dressed in traditional clothing, I can’t vouch for what they are for sure. They’re most likely just women dressed in traditional clothing. It is possible, however, that the one in the blue robe and red sash might be a maiko, which is an apprentice geisha. Geishas start their apprenticeship at the age of 15, and it appeared that she would have been about the right age. That doesn’t mean for sure that she was one, only that it’s a possibility.

Anyway, that was my time with the geishas. I didn’t really want to stick around sniping for more pictures of them, I already felt like what I was doing was wrong enough anyway, so I made my way out of there towards my first temple of the day, a temple that I think is called Chion-In Temple.

This place was massive. No, really, it was gigantic. No one building towered above all the others, but the complex itself was just sprawling. To get to the very top, I probably had to go up four large flights of stairs, maybe five. There isn’t a lot to say about most of the temple complex, though; it was a beautiful temple, but it was still just a temple. For the most part, unless you’re a spiritual person, these places are the type that are great to see, but not much to talk about. I suppose people who are into niche portions of Asian architecture might have a broader interest as well, but we won’t count those people.

The one thing that happened there that I can comment on was a Buddhist ceremony that I sat in on. I don’t know how long the entire ceremony was, since I didn’t get there at the beginning, but I sat in on it for about 10 or 15 minutes, until it ended. It consisted really of just one monk, chanting as well as hammering on a metal drum. The acoustics of the place, however, make it quite easy for a single voice to float through and fill up the entire building, which is exactly what happened. Some people were merely tourists like me, and like me, were probably only passingly interested in the ritual itself, and more interested in the respite the hall provided from the sun. Which isn’t to say that I was bored with the ritual or had no interest, just that the shade was a prime motivating factor for getting me to enter.

Oh, another thing that might come as a surprise to some people: you probably all know the culture of removing your shoes before entering a building that’s prevalent through all of Asia, but you probably mostly don’t think much about it; when it comes to public places like this, you’re also expected to remove your shoes, but some places, such as this temple, take another unusual step in providing plastic bags for you to put your shoes in and carry with you as you walk around, as opposed to just providing shelves/racks for you to place your shoes on. When you exit, you have to remove your shoes from the bag to put them back on your feet anyway, so you just deposit the bag back into the box of bags you first got it from, and life moves on.

As I moved farther up the stairs of the complex, the individual steps of which each measured at over a foot high, to each new plane, I noticed fewer and fewer tourists; not only that, but the demographics of the tourists transformed with the increasing altitude; namely, the white people stuck to the bottom. By the time I got to the third or fourth level, I was the only non-Japanese tourist; when I got to the final level, however, I was the ONLY tourist, period. This was an interesting little location, as it was in the middle of a graveyard, and being close to the top of the mountain that this whole temple complex was built into the side of, had a pretty good view of the city. Here’s a picture or two of that:

After having surmounted the graveyard, I felt enough was enough with this place; I knew there were actually a few portions I had missed, but I thought I had gotten a sufficient impression of it, so I decided to head north. My next destination that I had in mind is called the Heian shrine. Here’s some pictures:

There’s really almost nothing at all to be said about this shrine, beyond its appearance. Its ride in the middle of a vast public park area, with museums and the like; there was a municipal zoo nearby, and a museum of art, and a few other similar places. Although the Heian shrine has been around for quite a while, it almost feels like an afterthought in the area.

I stepped in to it, and it was mostly a wide open sand lot, with a few vermillion buildings. The most interesting thing about it was probably the trees of tied off bad luck; as I understand it, scattered throughout the assorted shrines of Japan, you can have your fortune told; the way the system works, is that you shake a canister full of little sticks, and allow one to fall out. They each have a kanji (Chinese character) on it that corresponds with one of a whole bunch of different drawers nearby; you select the appropriate drawer, and pull out a slip of paper from it; upon this is your fortune. If you have a good fortune, well, good for you. If you don’t, then protocol deems it necessary to tie it off on something nearby. Although I saw this practice in many places, the trees of ill fortune here at the Heian Shrine were by far the most striking, so here is a picture of that:

And that was it for the Heian shrine. From there, I moved almost directly west, crossing back over the river, slogging my way towards the Imperial Palace. Imagine my surprise when I arrived at the Palace grounds and found out that there’s not just one, but in fact two palaces at the grounds of the Imperial Palace! I don’t really know what the other palace was for, but, I know it was still a pretty impressive complex in its own right as well, even though I didn’t get to tour it. My main objective was to visit the old Imperial Palace itself; Kyoto was the capital of Japan for about a thousand years, approximately from 600AD to 1600AD, so a lot of history has taken place within those gates, and I quite looked forward to traipsing around through it.

Unfortunately, you can’t just go in at your leisure; you have to do it as a part of a guided tour, though this tour is free; as a non-Japanese person, they automatically assume you would prefer the English language tour, and there’s only two per day, so when I got to the office to sign up for one of these tours, I found out I would have to come back the next day for the tour itself; though I would have preferred to have just seen it then and there, I felt this wasn’t too big of a problem, and signed up for their 11am tour. There was a German guy there about my age who seemed pretty frustrated about this, from what little I could glean from his expressions and tone of voice, but I didn’t take any heed of it.

After I signed up for the tour, knowing that my objectives for the day were by and large complete (although it was only about 2:30pm), I headed to the little restaurant/souvenir shop right next to the office, and partook of some ice cream. Mmmmm, ice cream. I don’t think I could have gotten through Japan without ice cream. During the summertime, at least, it seems like everyone in Japan has a foot in the ice cream trade, and little two to three foot plastic lit-up ice cream cones pop up all over the place, announcing to the world that for a low cost, there you might be able to quench off some of the scorching heat you’ve faced for the day. Expert marketing, or simple fact of life? You be the judge. But I certainly was the customer.

While eating my ice cream, I got a map out of the city, and considered my next move. I found myself suddenly faced with the disgruntled German man across from me at the same table, eating some udon soup. We ended up talking for a spell, as we all know its best to not allow a disgruntled German man to stay that way (bad things happen), and I found myself only regretting the decision, as he complained more and more about how strict they were about the rules for visiting these kinds of locations.

Though I too would have liked to have free reign of the place, I am under no illusion in regards to my right to visit the sites of cultural legacy in other places; as far as I’m concerned, they’re under no obligation whatsoever to allow me to visit them. That they do allow it is merely a mixture of grace and good capitalism on their part; therefore, trying to get us to observe precise rules so as to limit the amounts of deleterious interactions with their temples, castles, palaces, etc. seems only fair.

I didn’t want to deal with a blitzkrieg or something, so I mostly just let it slide with this German guy, but, I certainly had no sympathy, and eventually excused myself from his blathering, having finally made the decision to just go back to the hostel, as it was too hot for me to want to walk even further to the next location I was interested in, a castle called something like Nikojo-jo or something.

So I walked back. There was nothing interesting about this. When I got back to my hostel room, I found that a girl who had been there when I checked in in the morning was still there (this hostel room was mixed gender, four beds), so I made a bit of small talk with her after having showered and rested a little. She was a pretty young girl from Taiwan, just 19 or 20. She seemed nice enough, if a bit unusually hermetic given that she was in a hostel in another country; I have a hard time understanding why anyone in such a situation would want to stay indoors all day, but hey, who am I to decide?

I actually had a plan of sorts to meet Dominic, the German guy I scaled Mt. Fuji with, that afternoon, and after washing up and such, I was running close to the meeting time, so I told the Taiwanese girl that I was going to head out for that, and if she was around in the evening maybe we could hang out a little, just to try to get her out of the room a bit. She agreed, and I headed off.

I met Dominic in front of the gigantic Kyoto Station, where there was a gathering of 20 or more girls and guys in traditional yukata; all were young, probably in their 20s or so, and though I had seen plenty of people wandering through Japan at this point in yukata, I had never seen such a preponderance of them in one location, without there being a festival or something to justify it. Dominic was also surprised, so he took a couple pictures.

Poor Dominic had taken the earlier portion of the day to visit a location I had also intended to visit; Philosopher’s Walk, but it seems like forgetting to go there was a sound decision, as Dominic was ravaged by a horde of wasps while walking along it, and was stung maybe a half dozen times or more, including twice on his skull. Some lesson in philosophy, indeed.

We were both pretty hungry, so we made off for a place to eat; having accomplished that, we settled for a little sightseeing, and as Dominic had not yet walked through the Geisha districts, we walked through those at nighttime, and though we didn’t see any geishas, we did spend more time in those entrancing wooden halls, and Dominic was quite content with that. While walking back, we grabbed a couple of drinks and sat on the river’s edge, next to a whole bunch of other young people just hanging out, enjoying the light cool breeze given off by that very same river, wiping the heat not only from our bodies, but from our minds as well.

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Our last stop on our itinerary for the night was to drop by a bar; Dominic insisted that we have a drink in commemoration of Mt. Fuji, and given the circumstances, I couldn’t really argue otherwise. So we stopped by a little bar on a corner of the street that we had to walk along to get back to our respective lodgings.

This place was zany. Brushed steel walls, weird wannabe 50’s décor, with a television playing one of Michael Jackson’s movies (was there a movie called “Bad” also, or was that just a song title?), where Michael tries to insist he’s some sort of badass; though it was prior to most of his emasculating surgeries, I don’t really think there was ever a time when someone would have been intimidated by MJ. The bartender was a hoarse Japanese lady in her late 40s or early 50s, who was probably quite beautiful when she was younger, but now looked like she had smoked a pack too many. I would never advocate physical abuse of women, but, if she was a piñata, instead of candy, ash would have come out. Just sayin’.

We ended up having two glasses of cold sake each. It was my first time drinking sake (many of you know, but some don’t, that I haven’t exactly drank very much in my lifetime; my first drink was only a few weeks ago, at my friend’s bachelor party followed by wedding; small bottle of wine atop Mt. Fuji excepted, this was my next drink). I found the stuff surprisingly easy to down, and the taste was quite sublime; not in the sense of extraordinary and transcendental, but in that it flies under the radar. The taste was not strong, yet there was no denying that it had a lot of flavor.

With those glasses bottomed up, we headed out and made our final strut down the quiet streets that run parallel with the nightlife area; though they’re only separated by scarcely more than a few buildings, the difference is of that between night and day.

We parted ways, grateful to have seen each other once again in the wake of Fuji, and though I may never again see Dominic, the farewell was in no way bittersweet; both of us were confident that each other’s lives would hold plenty of positive things for each other in the future, and we looked upon those times with mutual confidence and encouragement.

At this point, it was already getting late-ish (by Japanese standards, anyway, outside of Tokyo and Osaka), but when I got to my room, the Taiwanese girl was still up, and still just sitting on her computer in the hostel room, so we hung out for a while. At this point, another of my roommates, a girl named Celeste, from Canada, came in, and we all got to talking for a bit; the Taiwanese girl and I agreed to head downstairs to a bar attached to the hostel, and Celeste agreed to join us after using a computer for a bit.

So, I spent the next hour or so with the Taiwanese girl, and though I can’t remember her name for the life of me, we conversed pretty well, never having a lull to speak of, and we lubricated the exchange with another glass of sake each; at some point, Celeste made her appearance, and we talked until a bit after midnight, which was technically past the closing time of the establishment (keep in mind it wasn’t a full fledged separate bar, just a well stocked addendum to the hostel). After this, we retired to our room, speaking for just a while longer, before finally calling it a night, getting ready to recharge for what was in store for us for the next day.