I was awake before 8am. I snuck down the creaky bunk bed ladder and, after a shower, I decided I would devote my morning to visiting Nara, a small city thirty miles southeast of Kyoto.

While Kyoto is the basin of Japanese history, Nara is its quiet religious counterpart. After Kyoto was built in 794, in importance, Nara always lagged behind its northern big brother but remained a steadfast home to Japanese Buddhism.

While it isn’t nearly as large and hasn’t nearly as many tourist sights as Kyoto, Nara’s age is astonishing alone. Most consider the Nara region to have held the original Japanese civilization. Kofun burial grounds existing from well before the mid-sixth century are still on view within the city limits. Nara also holds two particular sights that I wanted to see. So, I bought a 1,200 yen ($10 USD) round trip ticket and returned once more to Kyoto Station.

Despite its small size, Nara is an active tourist center, particularly because of its propinquity to Kyoto, less than an hour by express train. I walked out of the station en masse and flowed towards the city’s northeastern corner, home to the 1,235 acre Nara-koen Park. Passed a small pond overpopulated by muddy water and sunbathing turtles, I came to the first of Nara’s most famous residents: its deer.

Yes, Nara-koen, Japan’s largest city park, is home to more than 1,500 tame deer (See Photos in Kyoto Album). Having crossed land bridges during the Ice Age, deer have been in Japan before even the Japanese and are divine messengers according to Shinto.

The pack of deer that inhabit northeastern Nara walk calmly, surrounded by thousands of camera clicking tourists and Frisbee-tossing locals, feeding on shika sembei, deer crackers, that are sold at stalls throughout the park and then handfed to the deer by children and curious adults. I know. Ecologists and environmentalists everywhere are shocked, appalled even. Feeding the animals? Giving teenage boys the opportunity to torment animals and teaching toddlers how to tease deer?

That is just why it is such a remarkable sight. Eco-disasters can be fascinating, and I can’t pretend that I didn’t use the opportunity to pet as many deer as I could. I avoided the males and didn’t tease anyone. What would a rural upbringing offer if not that?

I pressed on through the park, finding more and more groups of these deer being chased or chasing someone with deer crackers or even something extra from lunch. I was off to the more traditional sight and Nara’s pride and joy, Todaji-Temple’s Daibutsen, Great Buddha, the largest bronze statue in the world (See Photos in Kyoto Album). If you remember, a few weeks ago I was in Kamakura south of Tokyo and got to see the second largest Buddha in Japan. Well, Nara’s is number one, in Japan, in the world.

This Daibutsen is five stories tall, weighs 550 tons and was cast 1,200 years ago. You want some perspective? When Daibutsen was cast, the world’s population was hovering under 250 million. Today, there are well over 6.5 billion people on this planet, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

As I am prone to doing, I stood staring for a time, looking at Daibutsen’s squinted eyes. This image of the Vairocana Buddha, the Buddha of which all others are aspects, is certainly overwhelming. Sitting inside the world’s largest wooden structure, which was rebuilt in 1708, Daibutsen incorporates some 290 pounds of gold and is surrounded by other statues and Buddhist images from the sixteenth century and earlier.

It was nearly 4pm, so I ate a small lunch and took a lazy local train back to Kyoto, fighting sleep with my head on the window watching small towns and rural villages pass by my glare. Back in Kyoto, I walked to a few temples of lesser importance based in the city’s center corridor. In time, night had set in, and I found myself back in the Geisha district of Gion.

I ate a few seaweed-draped rice cakes and began walking towards the brightly-lit Minamiza Theater, Japan’s oldest Kabuki theater. I leaned on the fence across the street, munching on miso dondo and let the moment sink in. How odd that I was there, on Shijo dori, this aged avenue, staring at this historic building, eating flavored, pounded rice balls on a stick.

It was after 8pm and I was struck with an idea. I walked back to the hostel to grab a towel and some soap. I was determined to finish my night with another Japanese experience that too many tourists will never know, a sento, or public bath.

I asked the hostel’s clerk for directions to the neighborhood sento and marched to its door. Public baths have history in Japan, particularly in consolidated communities where traditionally many homes might not have places for bathing. Today, these baths are dying, like so many traditions, as any new or remodeled homes have showers. Still, many Japanese consider them important, particularly for their social value and community bonding.

I took off my shoes, walked past a curtain and paid 300 yen ($2.50 USD). I was ushered to the left, as sentos are most often split in half, one side for men, the other for women and young children. I entered what appeared to be a locker room, with a naked man or two.

An elderly man must have sensed my unsure steps, as he took me by the hand and all but undressed me and put my clothes into a locker. Now naked and standing as close to an old man as I had ever been naked, I opened the glass door into a large tiled room, lined with faucets surrounding six square bath tubs.

I lathered up and cleaned myself at one of the faucets. I had another moment of introspective thought, staring at my reflection, a shapely Japanese buttocks framed in the mirror behind me. I laughed, washed my hair, wiped myself down and moved to the lone unoccupied bath.

I slid into the steamy, frothing water and closed my eyes, my mind the only part of my body busy in motion. I walked out of those humid confines more than an hour later and after drying, I stood with a handful of men in various stage of dress watching the national news cover the latest on the North Korean nuclear weapons program. The language was lost on me, but the images made the message clear. No matter, I had drifted into the crowd, if only just for a moment, and it felt right. Fully satisfied with my final night in Kyoto, I walked to my hostel after a quick dinner at another bar and fell into another deep and uninterrupted sleep.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Click here to read Kyoto Part 1.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 2.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 3.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 4.
Click here to read the Final Entry: Kyoto Part 6

Posted by Christopher at 02:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

It was still quite dark, the smell of fresh dough, seeming distinctly un-Japanese, wafted in the air, reminding me of an early morning or two I have met in Philadelphia over the years. I decided that a nice way to greet the sunrise would be along the reflective and apparently serene Tetsugaku-no-michi, or Path of Philosophy, so I turned my rudders towards its shores.

It took more than an hour of deliberate steps forward, uninterrupted but for a quick stop in a konbini, convenience store, to buy a breakfast of egg and apple juice, for me to arrive at the path’s simple, stone-worked entrance. (See Photos in Kyoto Photo Album)

The path was nothing to inspire awe. It was a tiny stone path buried by patches of small trees and untamed bushes diverted by a neighborhood shrine and some of the last remaining old style Japanese wooden homes in the country.

It did have some of the first fallen leaves I had seen before old men with brooms hadn’t cleaned up. The path was aged and the canal that ran parallel was a rare example of Japanese cement making a water view more beautiful. The sky went from black to gray to blue and as I reached the end of the three-quarter mile path and turned to my next destination, Sunday morning was in full bloom.

Down the road, I came to another canal, with flowing water and a series of benches. With my heavy bag already deforming the shoulder it slung over, I took a seat and watched bright orange koi fish.

I sit near a stream
A leaf flows with the current
What is the meaning?

Having rested and rubbed the head of a dog which passed me on a leash, I got up and lurched forward, my bag, disheveled umbrella and camera in hand. Two of Kyoto’s more famous temples are grouped together far in the city’s northwestern corner. There were busses and subways, however it was barely 6am, I budget and am always ready to explore a new city by foot, so I walked on.

Kyoto was waking up. I saw joggers and photographers manning a small park that sits on Kama-gawa River as it splits in two. The cars came faster and the bicycle population grew. I walked through the Gyoen National Garden, centered around Kyoto Gosho, the former imperial palace (See Photos in Kyoto Album).

I walked inside the 27 acres of Daitoku-ji Temple, my eyes lingering on a woman dressed in a kimono who was climbing into a taxi. A gentle rain began to fall from the grayish blue morning sky and I hoisted my umbrella up its little flag pole allowing it to waver and wane in the wind. Daitoku-ji was founded in 1324 and most of the compound’s remaining temples and shrines were built in the mid-1400s (See Photos in Kyoto Album).

I walked the mile and a half to the Kinkaku-ji Temple, a hilly walk along Kitaoji-dori. The walls of Kinkaku-ji hold one of Japan’s most famous images. I followed the crowds and agreeably traded 500 yen for a ticket and a pamphlet. I passed a booth and through a gate and before me, mirrored crisply in the pond that surrounded it, rested the Golden Pavilion. (See Photos in Kyoto Album). Yes, the Golden Pavilion is what stands behind the photo of me on my main page.

A Japanese shogun from the fourteenth century bought a house and had it transformed into his magnificent retirement villa. After his death in 1408, his home became a temple, sparkling in Kyoto until 1950 when a crazed monk burned it to the ground. It is claimed that it was built to the exact specifications of its predecessor. Its gold-leaf coating is nonetheless a gleaming tribute, warranting busloads of visitors and remaining perhaps the most photographed image in Japan.

Afterwards I began the walking towards the Ryoan-ji, the Peaceful Dragon Temple. Its tennis court-sized garden is famed worldwide for its contemplative motif of raked sand and strategically placed rocks. I had been walking continuously since 4am. My feet hurt, my bag was dragging and I began to wonder if I cared at all about raked sand. I decided I didn’t.

I was at least three hours of walking from the Kyoto Station so I cheated. I posited 200 yen and grabbed a bus back to the station.

It was still before 12pm so I decided I’d check into the hostel in which I’d be staying that night. I dropped off my bags, stopped for a brief lunch and reorientated my tour. I headed east to the Sanjusangen-do Temple, home of the 1,001 Buddhas. I paid 500 yen, took some photos of the brilliant orange gates and buildings, and headed towards the sight to be seen. The temple was founded in 1132 and rebuilt in 1266 following a fire, making its feeling of age genuine (See Photos in Kyoto Album).

After removing my shoes and regretfully finding that no photos are allowed to be taken of the statues, I turned a corner and was blown away by a chorus of five foot tall golden figures, stretching as far as I could see in rows seven or eight deep. I moved quietly and respectfully, head bowed, behind those that lit incense and prayed to these figures, representations of the Buddhist deity Kannon. Each statue flowed into the next, a sight to be seen. In the middle of the army of the Kannons was the largest, the one thousand and first. Beyond him was even more, 500, I might guess. I stepped out quietly and moved on.

From there, I marched eagerly north to the Kiyomizu-dera Temple. Tucked in the wooded foothills of the Higashi-yama it holds, I had been told, a view of the entire city of Kyoto. I walked uphill along a tightly-packed, body length-wide road until brilliantly colored karamon, welcome gate, caught my eyes (See Photos in Kyoto Album). The crowd of which I was part rumbled up the stairs and through the gate of the temple, established in the eighth century.

The Temple was a station of several structures. The most recently-built dated from the early seventeenth century. The intricate and ornate buildings and their radiant colors were so dazzling that it took me some time before I turned to take in the view of sprawling Kyoto. The image of these traditional and spiritual structures overlooking a modern city, with its concrete and traffic, was one of the most unique sights of my life.

I sauntered through the path, pausing to catch water from a sacred fall and sip it from a long-armed metal cup for good luck and longevity. I walked down from the Kiyomizu-dera and headed towards the hostel in which I would be sleeping that night. I stopped briefly to negotiate for two small, rice bowls, brightly colored and hand-crafted, and then continued on my way. It was nearly 7pm by the time I made it back to the skinny building in which I had reserved a bed for myself.

The hostel was an abrupt clutter of bicycles and travel guides climbing five narrow floors overlooking a busy intersection just five blocks south of Kyoto Station. I checked in and questioned the price as the cheap are want to do. The cost of 2,500 yen ($21 USD) per night so close to central Kyoto needn’t be challenged, but challenge it I did. The price remaining the same between the hostel’s one single and the few nine person rooms, in which one I would be staying, seemed strange. It was then the clerk smilingly asked if I would give him a 1,000 yen ($8 USD) deposit for my room key. I acquiesced and went to bathe.

I took my bags to the communal shower room up three flights of stairs, the walls covered with both smiling pictures of youngish people who roam the world seeing photographic sights and with suggestions written in English that could be understood but had no grammar correctness.

These were supplemented by reminders that were correct grammatically but couldn’t mean what they said. One sign on a window read, ‘don’t throw away anything. It bothers our neighbors.’ I imagine the message’s author wanted to encourage guests not to throw anything out of the window. Maybe I was just tired.

I showered and decided that because I hadn’t slept in 32 hours or even been off my feet for longer than 15 minutes for nearly 20 hours, I would go to sleep early, after a quick bite to eat at a local bar. So, after settling into my top bunk adjacent to a rickety metal wire shelf that was topped with my belongings, I finally closed my eyes.

My last memory awake was of my roommates; the Dutch boat builder with whom I had spoken, two teachers from New Zealand with whom I hadn’t, and a South African medical school graduate with whom I would, speaking together, with a Japanese roaming motorcyclist pretending to listen. I didn’t stir once throughout the night.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Click here to read Kyoto Part 1.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 2.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 3.

Click here to read Kyoto Part 5.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 6

Posted by Christopher at 02:16 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Kyoto Station is, in a word, enormous.

After Nagoya, Kyoto holds the country’s largest train station, along with a shopping mall, a department store, a hotel, a movie theater, and local government facilities all under its fifteen-story roof. With an overwhelming glass front, its modernism and futuristic style is impressive on its own, but is difficult to rectify with its role as being the portal through which the world finds Japan’s historical heart. It opened in 1997 after being built to commemorate Kyoto’s 1,200th anniversary. Nearly 250 feet high and more than 1,500 feet wide, the plans for the station were begun after hundreds of proposals were rejected, including several that included traditional Japanese architecture.

After I entered the station and found the tourist agency was closed for the day, I turned my back on the building and, with a rudimentary map I drew myself from a sign near the bus stop, I set out looking to eat, ignoring the reality that it was nearing 8pm and I still had no where to sleep.

I wandered in circles for a while until I felt comfortable with the feel of Kyoto, its grid-style street system a welcome treat after months in the mess of spaghetti streets of Tokyo. It was after 10pm and I had walked some distance by the time I walked into a smoky bar just a few blocks west of the station. I ate in an orange room with orange tables. Six Japanese men in their late twenties sat eating chicken wings with chopsticks and drinking beer washed down with laugher and comfort and home. They smoked cigarettes and poked fun at each other.

I ordered a Chinese noodle soup and opened my National Geographic travel book that has directed much of my travels so far. In time, the bar got more and more crowded and I was sharing my table with a couple guys a few years older than I am. I told them I was a student from Tokyo visiting Kyoto in my shaky Japanese. After they pointed out suggestions on my map and we exhausted our ability to communicate, I put my nose back in my guide.

I would head to Gion, the old entertainment and geisha district of Kyoto. It was a long walk east, passed the Kyoto Station and over the Kama-gawa River, but soon enough the 12am darkness was abuzz and replaced with neon lights and motion.

I circled the neighborhood, passing old chaya, teahouses, and ryokan, traditional inns, along with overwhelmingly-lit pachinko parlors and Western-style restaurants. In time, I found my way back to the banks of Kama-gawa River, darker and quieter, with the wide expanse of the river flowing in the night. I strolled its path, passing couples embraced and old men walking dogs.

I came to Kyoto without anywhere to sleep that night and was soon moved to make the banks of Kama-gawa my bed. I climbed up a small rock wall, tucked behind some bushes and covered with the reach of a weepy willow tree. I bedded down there, my stuffed bag as pillow and my still-damp towel as blanket, the first glimpse of Japanese stars I had found and the moon keeping watch on the occasional bicycle that passed along the path below. The night was crisp and cloudless, and I knew this would be a fine beginning to a fine trip.

I fell asleep late that Saturday night/Sunday morning, but my sleep along the Koma-gawa River in Kyoto wasn’t to last. It was around 3am that I was woken by something dripping on my face. My willow tree cover was more romantic than practical, as I looked to sky realized the stars were gone, the moon had left and my cloudless night have become anything but. It was raining.

My umbrella was, as my umbrellas have tended to be in Japan, in poor shape. To be accurate, it was less an umbrella than a limp heap of plastic occasionally strung to a loose-fitted collection of bend and broken metal bars. I closed it, put up my hood, heaped up my bag, heavy with books and four days of provisions, and headed back towards Kyoto Station in order to take cover.

I sat under a bus stop and, in between flipping pages of a book on Japanese culture, I shivered, watching the rain drizzle down and thinking, as I often do, about where I was at that very moment. Alone and damp and weighed down and burdened. Yet, at the same time, I was free and unencumbered, outside of a deserted bus depot, save for a smelly man who had a brief conversation with me and himself.

The night was beautiful and promising, and I fell asleep in its comfort. I was awakened by its dreary, rainy counterpart. So, it becomes important to realize that to our eyes the clouds move faster than the sun. The rain will pass. Tomorrow is another day, and, with any luck, you wake up to greet it, finding new opportunities with a new disposition.

I closed my book, nodded at the toothless woman who walked in circles and decided that my first day in Kyoto would begin at 3:47am.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Click here to read Kyoto Part 1.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 2.
Click here to read Kyoto Part 4.

Check back soon for Kyoto Part 5.

Posted by Christopher at 02:18 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I woke up to the bright sunlight of a glorious Tokyo Saturday morning. It was the weather that manages to find your doorstep just once every other week this time of year but is well worth the wait. It was before 8am so I lazily sauntered around my apartment, making breakfast, packing a lunch and scratching what needed to be scratched.

I ordered the apartment, locked her up to be empty for the next four days, and walked the 15 minutes to the Jiyugaoka train station. Ten weeks ago on the third day I was in Tokyo, I had some trouble finding my way to and home from Shinjuku, the busiest train station in the world. If you saw my first episode in Japan, you know that. Shinjuku was my destination, but on this day, there was no trouble. I knew it was easy then, I proved it was easy on Saturday.

From the Shinjuku Station, I stumbled my way out of the new south exit, clicking photos of the area’s skyscraper district. I found the highway bus ticket office and with the help of a kindly attendant, I picked up both my ticket to and from Kyoto. Still an hour until departure, I ventured out of the bus depot, intent on scurrying around Shinjuku, a huge portion of Tokyo of which I haven’t seen much.

The depot was in the southeast so I decided to find the bottom portion of Kabuki-cho, a famed Tokyo entertainment district. It was 10am, but I thought it was worth seeing the streets that manage to attract more than 500,000 people to the area’s restaurants and bars. Its reputation is a shady one to most tourists, known for having a distinct presence of the yakuza, the famous network of Japanese mafia. Moreover, of the 3,000 entertainment outlets of East Shinjuku’s Kabuki-cho, 500 are devoted to sleaze, according to National Geographic. Nightly, the neon lights overtake the sky and mostly naked kinban gyaru – signpost girls – crowd the sidewalks.

Not surprisingly, the streets, metal-doored entrances, and shuttered windows were like so many others I had seen in Tokyo. There were bodies sharing the sidewalks with me and the sound of street cleaners fought with a light wind. I made a circle and met my bus in the depot. I asked the conductor at least four times if it was the correct bus, determined to avoid getting lost, at least not yet. *If you haven’t been lost, you haven’t traveled. Still, I wanted to start in the right.

It was the right bus (See Photos in Kyoto Album). I nestled into my comfortable seat, slipped into the slippers provided for me and leaned my head on the glass, a reflection in my eyes and a song in my mind.

The road would wind south, taking me by the Mount Fuji I had climbed more than two months prior. As I had remembered, Tokyo raced the bus, skyscraping buildings and expansive billboards following my gaze for nearly an hour. Slowly, metropolitan Tokyo puttered out, the buildings shrinking into multistory apartment buildings which flowed into power-line-covered suburban homes.

With time, the green-treed pyramids clashing and forming together that I met on my way to Fuji returned, and I exchanged a smile for their beleaguered grins. Those huge backed beasts of rock covered in green trees are pimpled with radio towers, an often criticized sign of Japan’s technologically-deficient environmental policy, of which there are many.

When I could find a break in the power lines and towers, the view was powerful. Providing the type of view that makes you think looking isn’t enough, that you have to do something, like collecting it in a box to show to your friends.

You see, despite the suburban sprawl that goes on below, other than the power lines, Japanese mountains are almost always simply and beautifully green and aimless altitude changes. For millennia, the people of Honshu believed the mountains were for the gods and inhabiting them was taboo. The result being that the feet of these mountains are overrun with Japanese homes, but the mountains themselves are still often uninhabited (See Photos in Kyoto Album).

But those power lines. Scan your U.S. neighborhood, drive through the beauty of the American west, so much of our electrical sources have been buried in the ground in the past few decades. How is Japan so far behind? Its environmentalism is largely a joke.*

The bus window had water spots obscuring my view as if no one cared to look out. Looking around the bus it seemed as though my fellow passengers justified the window’s lack of cleanliness. Still, for me, there were moments when electrical lines subsided, and I breathed in a bit of rural Japanese splendor.

The agriculture of Japan is small business, meaning a lot of family farms with village rice paddies and small fields of wheat or thatch, not the 10,000 acre ranches or the multimillion dollar agribusiness corporate farms of today’s rural America.

Even spotting Japanese homes that weren’t directly adjacent was a unique sight for me, previously relegated to tightly packed Tokyo. In the background, two mountain peaks would frame a third, more distant rise in the distance, blued by the sky and chased by the clouds.

How could I have ever even thought of taking an overnight bus?

By 3:30pm, the bus shook me awake from a drowsy state of semi-consciousness as it settled at the Komagatake rest stop. I took the steps off the bus onto the parking lot, wiping my eyes, and found a chilly world around me, an empire of sprawling shadows of clouds feuding with a mishmash of greenery at the horizon.

I went to the bathroom and stared wide-eyed at the walls that made where I stood more a valley than a paved rest area. I climbed back onto the bus, and, after a head count, the bus quietly engaged and trudged on.

As Japanese speakers tend to do when I feel I need to understand them, using the bus’s intercom, the driver spoke at length once the bus regained speed on the highway. As he mumbled on, I decided I would pretend he was reading a book to all the passengers, trying to settle us all into a comfortable nap, ignoring his directions. I closed my eyes, regularly reopening them as if trying to catch the Japanese scenery as it tried to sneak an amazing sight past my weakening guard.

We passed an occasional Shinto graveyard, a mess of closely packed small stone towers ornately engraved and gated at the foot of the legends of the surrounding mountain-scape.

Nearing six pm, the bus stopped in Yoro, in what, I assumed, would be the last stop before we reached our destination. Bag in hand, I strode into the darkening early evening and walked to the bathroom, anxious to be able to say that I had brushed my teeth in a crowded Japanese rest stop.

I once again nestled into my seat and thought how much I loved traveling on the roads of this world. How there are few places I would rather be than in an automobile on a beautiful day driving by the astounding sights that make the postcard industry profitable. You see, I love the pursuit of an adventure, the planning and following through and the preparation. Why do I love the bus or the car, always going somewhere, but never happy when I’m there?

But that bus will stop in time. You will have to get off and make choices. There is a fear in that. En route, there is only the thought of what is to come, the wonder of the gloriously expectant but unknown. Arrival means challenge and thinking and doing. Decisions bring death to the ignorant.

Not long after 6:30pm, the bus pulled left past a sign that read Yokachi. After forty minutes of traffic, there was a rustle of my fellow passengers readying their bags and with a lurch, we had arrived at Kyoto Station.

Click Here to continue on to Part 3: The Night

Jaa ne,
Christopher
_______________________________________________________________________
* If this interests you, be absolutely certain to check back in the coming weeks, because I will be posting a fully-researched, scathing attack on the Japanese government’s relationship with the environment.

Posted by Christopher at 02:12 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

There are 15 national holidays in Japan. Last Monday was Taiiku No Hi, or Health and Sports Day, to commemorate the opening day of the 1964 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. It was an important day to many Japanese, a sign that their country had recovered from the destruction of World War II. To me, the day was motivation, not reflection. You see, the undergraduate program at my school took Tuesday off as well. This meant a four day weekend and therefore necessitated something particularly exciting to continue my devotion to travel at each week’s end. I have not failed you.

In my first two and half months in Japan, I have had a great deal of difficulty getting out of metropolitan Tokyo. About this I have lamented before. I went to Yokohama, supposedly the country’s second largest city, but the Japanese laughed at this. I went to Kamakura, a former Japanese capital, but they told me no. I have been to Shibuya and Shinjuku, with populations and infrastructures and even histories that made them capable of being large cities on their own, but, they suffered the same fate at Kichijoji, where I watched a fall festival.

They were swallowed by the expanding and swirling concrete mixers and construction contracts of bestially uncontrolled Tokyo. My first weekend I went hours south to climb Mount Fuji, but some tell me Tokyo even runs to the feet of Fuji-san. In my first two and half months in Japan, I have been visiting Tokyo, not Japan. I couldn’t find Tokyo’s end.

This past four day weekend was my first undisputed foray into a Japan without a postal code of the world’s largest city. I decided that if there was only one other place a typical sightseer needed to see in Japan beyond Tokyo’s cemented forest, it would be Kyoto.

Kyoto, along with the cities Nara, Osaka and Kobe, make up the center of the Kansai region, the yin to Tokyo’s yang. Or maybe the yang to Tokyo’s yin? I’m not sure, that’s Chinese philosophy anyway. My point is that if this was going to be my only chance to legitimately leave all of the Tokyo beast behind me – which I hope it isn’t – Kyoto was the way to do it.

Indeed, Kyoto was founded more than 1,200 years ago and, thanks to its survival of World War II bombings, it is home to Japan’s greatest collection of traditional culture. In a place like Japan, having the country’s greatest collection of tradition means something.

After being founded in 794, Kyoto had a millennia long ride as Japan’s capital and with its wealth of cultural treasures, it is, according to National Geographic, “the single greatest tourist destination in Japan.”

Indeed, while by The Shinkansen, Japan’s famed system high speed railway lines, Tokyo is just a three hour jaunt from Kyoto, an increasing number of foreign and domestic visitors stick to Japan’s historical core.

So, Kyoto it was. Without a Japanese Rail Pass, which only becomes sensible after weeks of extended train travel, the Shinkansen can be intolerably expensive, so I decided I would stick to the time honored method of bus travel.

With the help of a native speaker, I had myself a spot on an 8 hour bus trip heading to Kyoto Saturday morning and coming back Tuesday morning for 10,000 yen ($84 USD). An overnight bus, my friends, would have been (a little) cheaper and given me (a little) more time, but, there are nearly 400 miles between Kyoto and Tokyo, 400 miles for my eyes to see, for my mind to decode, for my heart to absorb.

I would see a bit of rural Japan, in decline at a rate far greater than American agriculture. Forget its history and perceptions of subsistence rice farming, about 5 percent of the country’s labor force rests in the ag-industry but nets less than 2 percent of Japan’s gross national product, despite heavy government subsidies. It is small, it is getting smaller. They are poor, they are getting poorer. My bus trip there would be a sight unto itself.

That meant three nights and two full days of Kyoto rampaging: I set about finding a place to stay. A ryokan, a traditional Japanese hotel, are tourist favorites, with their wooden architecture and kimono-clad employees, but they are generally very… very expensive. A western hotel would be both expensive (for me) and terribly uninteresting. I am a man of limited means in pursuit of challenging experiences. Hostels, cheap, communal living, are wonderful options.

However, I was doing all of this the week I set to leave so, to my surprise, I found reservations were scarce. I found one hostel that provided any opening at all. I booked a bed for Sunday and Monday night at 2,500 yen a night ($21 USD). Let me summarize. I would be leaving Shinjuku Station in Tokyo Saturday morning and arriving in Kyoto Saturday night. I had a hostel reservation for Sunday night and Monday night, before I would take a bus Tuesday morning, getting me back to Tokyo Tuesday night. There was a gap in my planning, you see. I had no home for Saturday night.

I am not one to worry about such matters. No one can interrupt what I will call an adventure.

Indeed.

Less than a year ago, the Mainichi Daily News reported that Kyoto, the only major Japanese city to entirely avoid wartime bombing, was listed as one of the top ten vacation spots that Japanese travelers never wanted to visit again. Common gripes were that the city was crowded and expensive. It isn’t clear if these people were at all familiar with their country’s capital. I had been in Tokyo for nearly ten weeks, Kyoto was going to be an adventure and pure vacation.

Jaa ne,
Christopher

Click Here to continue on to Part 2: The Road

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