Templed-out

On that Thursday we had a full-day tour of Kyoto. Up to that moment I had a very romantic notion of this city, as the ancient imperial capital lost in time, a quaint place filled with palaces and temples, where geishas roamed around in their traditional outfits. Let’s say I got the palaces and temples part right. Japan’s Disneyland is in Tokyo, but Kyoto feels like a Disneyland too, with so many tourists no matter everywhere you look, and tour guides, and lines to get into any “attraction”, not to mention the numerous places you can go into to dress up like a maiko (a geisha apprentice), wig and white make-up included, and walk around the teahouse district like that.

Our tour began at Nijô castle which, in spite of its name, was more like the shogun’s official Kyoto residence. There’s actually very little that’s castle-like about it. Still, it’s worth seeing, for different reasons. Since the emperor use to live in Kyoto, the shogun kept a residence here, where he would meet with the emperor’s officers and other lords, while his family remained in Edo.

The architecture of the “castle” is a lesson is security. The floors were made squeaky on purpose (they call this device nightingale floors), so that the shogun could hear anyone approaching and the whole place is a labyrinth of meeting rooms - according to the hierarchy of the visitors - and secret rooms, where the shogun’s men would hide, waiting for the first sign of trouble to storm through the meetings and kill any attackers. Some of the sliding door panels, as well as the ceilings, are beautifully painted.

Our second stop was Kinkaku-ji, the Buddhist temple famous in all of Japan for its golden pavilion. The gold-leaf covered building, which was burned to the ground by a monk in 1950, has been rebuilt and overlooks a pond, creating a mirror-like image of itself. A few other noteworthy sights at this temple are a mini five-story pagoda made of stones and a centuries-old pine tree that has been shaped into a sailboat.

The imperial palace was next and presented more of a hassle, because, unlike the other sights, it’s not administered by the Kyoto municipality, but by the imperial family. Even though no-one lives there anymore, they still need every visitor’s information and the tourists aren’t allowed on most of the compound, which includes any building’s interiors. What’s more, they count the number of people inside the palace’s gardens at any given time and for that reason every group must wait some five to ten minutes, standing in the sun, in one of four single lines, for easy counting. It turns out there isn’t that much to see. The buildings on the outside are plain, compared to the ones in Nijô castle, and the Japanese garden, albeit big, is not that impressive.

By now we were all hot and sweaty and in need of a break, so they took us to the Kyoto Handicraft Center for a buffet lunch. After eating we had a little time to browse the center’s several floors and buy a yukata for Steve. Soon, it was time to get back on the bus, to go to Heian-jingû, one of the most important Shinto shrines in the city, unremarkable but for its vast and peaceful garden, which includes a large pond with carp. We sat in the shade of its long bridge, admiring the fish and the cranes, before we set out to the next attraction.

We almost didn’t see the next temple, as Steve declared himself fed up with so many temples and shrines and I couldn’t help but agree. Still, we decided to stay for this one more, Sanjusangen-dô. This temple, over 800 years old, houses 1001 statues of the 1000-armed Kannon deity. There are really a thousand and one statues (even though a couple were been restored or on temporary lease to some museum), but the number of arms on each statue is actually 40, based in the Buddhist idea that each arm saves 25 worlds. So the building’s main hall is a really vast repository of statues, including one big Kannon statue, 500 smaller ones on each side, and a few more representing other Hindu-Buddhist deities. Too bad there were no pictures allowed, because all those statues lined up together make for an impressive sight indeed.

And so it was that, after that, we left our tour for the day, skipping the last temple on the itinerary and instead exploring the Kyoto streets on foot, on our way to the traditional Gion district. Unfortunately, we didn’t see any geishas or maiko, except for a few tourists dressed like them – you can tell them apart because real maiko wouldn’t just go around striking poses and taking pictures of each other; if they do find themselves out of the teahouses, they’re rushing to another appointment.

We decided to have dinner at Ponto-chô, an area of traditional-looking bars and restaurants along the riverside. Most of them are quite pricy, though, and only a handful actually overlooks the river. We ended up having sukiyaki at a quaint little place without a view, and then splurged in a drink each, plus cover-charge, at a bar that had a little patio over the water.