Tour of Kyoto

This is from October 31:

Today we had a tour with a tiny, energetic woman from the travel agency named Hiroko, which she told us was the most common female Japanese name. As both the Lonely Planet guide to Kyoto (the one most of us seem to have) and our guide noted, Kyoto has more than 1600 Buddhist temples and more than 400 Shinto shrines, so people who are interested in Japanese culture and history are usually happy as clams in Kyoto, where they can find more or what they are looking for than in any other Japanese city. Kyoto was spared the bombing rained on Tokyo, Osaka, and of course the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II, and there are many old structures to be found in Kyoto, although modern developers have succeeded where war fell short in destroying thousands of structures in the city in the past sixty years. It’s hard to warm up to much of the newer architecture, which to our eyes seems singularly undistinguished; there are more interested new buildings to be found in Beijing, where at least sometimes style wins over form. Our guide impressed on us the rules against building skyscrapers in Kyoto, but to my eyes they could use some prizes to reward interesting architecture that is not so purely utilitarian and just plain boring. We began with the Heian Temple, a Shinto shrine with two huge orange tori (ceremonial gates). She mentioned that although the idea of a shrine colored red was originally Chinese (think of the deep, pure red so often seen in Chinese restaurants, on lanterns, etc. – OPI Red, for those who are into nail polish colors) the Japanese preferred a lighter, brighter orange, a diluted red, if you will. Although the shrine is ancient, the gardens that surround it were not created until 1895, only a hundred years ago. It includes the first streetcar used in Kyoto, which was placed in the garden after streetcars were discontinued in Kyoto in 1925; the only connection between the two is that both began in 1895. Now the dusty green streetcar sits under a trellis, tucked into a corner of the shady garden, looking ready for the Boxcar Children to arrive. The Japanese take their gardens very seriously and much of our narrative today was about plants, especially trees, like the weeping willow, the official tree of Kyoto; the “drooping cherry,” tree peonies (Martha Stewart loves them), pine trees (one at another location is yearly cut into the flattened conical shape of Mt. Fuji, which costs an inordinate amount of money to pay the gardeners who do that), the lacquer tree (yes, it’s a tree!) and the trees with small shaky leaves that along with bamboo forests provide the characteristic feathery look seen in both old and new Japanese movies (I’ll write a little more in another post about the trees in Kurosawa Akira’s 1957 version of Macbeth called Throne of Blood, where Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane, samurai style.) Then it was onto a Buddhist temple, one I had also visited this summer. It was a much more pleasant experience in the relative cool of October 31. Although it was foggy in the mountainous town of Kameoka when I left before eight this morning, by 9:30 the sun was out in downtown Kyoto on a sparkling Halloween day. It’s up a hill lined with small shops and restaurants. The temple itself is wooden and set into the side of a beautiful wooded hill.