Kyoto: Arrival

With the advent of our second polar vortex of the winter (I still prefer this to 90+ days in August but will concede that it's arguably nicer when you can "go outside" and not "die"), I'm taking the nudge to finally start replaying my trip to Japan!

These travels spanned the end of 2018 and start of 2019, and I figure we may as well kick things off with another one o' these li'l video type deals I make for funzos. This one covers the sort of stagger-around-town-in-the-early-morning-light jetlag of my first 30 or so hours on the ground in Kyoto. You can watch it... on the internet??? (More than the post that follows, in which I attempt to use "words" to "communicate" things, this video gets a sense of how this wander felt, I think.)

After the jump: the first wave of Kyoto!

The impetus for this trip, which I booked almost a year ago now, had been a prize, a threat, and a counterbalance. The prize was as a promised reward: if you finish your dissertation, you get to take three weeks in Japan, chasing down the recommendations of your siblings and friends, eating delicious and cheap food, and exploring a non-European culture for the first time. The threat was: if you have not finished and defended your dissertation, this trip will be miserable, you will be stressed, and it will be a waste of airline points, travel savings, and time. The counterbalance was: after a frenetic fall of revisions, defense, throwing an annual holiday party, and Christmas with the family, here was somewhere to unplug. The hope was, I could bring a kindle, a journal, a backpack with a few changes of clothes, and just be in the world with no deadlines, no "should be working on"s, and no set schedules. More on how all that worked out in a broader round-up. And now, it was the day after Christmas, and I was off.

AEROPLANE! (Not my aeroplane, I flew ANA, but I did not take a picture of the outside of my aeroplane. Oh no I messed up the trip already and I haven't even left the airport yet)

After a thirteen-hour flight from Chicago to Tokyo (with some mercifully sound-ish sleep midway) and a quick shower at Narita airport, I wrangled a bump to an earlier flight than what I'd initially booked and hopped a short-haul flight to Itami airport, just north of Osaka. A monorail ride and a li'l commuter rail later, I emerged in eastern Kyoto, just across the river from Gion. The sun having emphatically sat, I made a beeline for my guesthouse lodgings.

Halfway through the flight, the attendant who had given me her favorite places to go in Kyoto when she visits her family there came to my seat and said "You have to open the window, there's a wonderful view of the moon out there!" And there was and I also had a moment of thinking - there is so much culture and writing built around viewing the full moon in Japan and I think that is an extremely nice kind of thing to build a lot of culture around???

This all set me up for a fairly breathtaking start to Kyoto, which is a city that vexes a lot of people. The majority of the city itself was leveled not during WWII (when it was rather deliberately spared) but in the 1960s and especially the 1970s, as Japanese bureaucrats decided that Westernization meant erecting ugly concrete buildings and demolishing traditional wooden ones. As a result, the city core is defiantly blah, with little to distinguish itself... but Gion retains a great many of the wooden structures that predate the modern era, and stands at the base of the hills and mountains covered with temples from which our cultural imagination of Kyoto mostly comes. Starting here, there was a sense of history, and of a changed pace. It felt good!

Like for instance lookit these li'l guys on this li'l street! You won't be seeing that in Central Kyoto! Although to be fair you won't be seeing KFC in Gion. So I guess there are positives on all sides. One thing we can all agree on, though, is that there will be Starbucks everywhere, they'll just sometime be very adept at blending into their surroundings.

That first night, I just staggered to the hotel and passed out - it was 9 PM in Kyoto, but 6 AM back in Chicago, and I'd slept some number of hours, but was eager to reset my clock. The hotel was in some ways perfect for this: a traditional guesthouse, it was largely uninsulated, with individual heaters in each bedroom, and marshmallowy-soft futon to burrow into. (Cold with a warm bed is my favorite emotion.)

I woke up before 4 AM, because my body is reliably an idiot, and around 4:30 I decided to give up and go exploring. Shinto shrines are generally open all night, I knew, and Kiyomizudera, the major temple complex of the city that stood a thirty-minute walk from my pad, would officially open its gates at 6 AM. I went off into the night, and quickly found a stillness and quiet that felt remarkable and conspiratorial.... though first I had to cut through a few blocks where partiers were wrapping up all-night booze sessions, and politely decline two (2) propositions from women who, ah, seemed to be looking for a different kind of 4:30 AM street-wanderer.

(A side note on this: it really is true, and strange in living it out, how safe Japan is. I'm not a paranoid traveler - I don't do the moneybelt thing, for instance - but there's something marvelous about being somewhere that you just do not have to worry about the fact that, due to the cash-based economy and limited ATMs that take international cards, you have to carry hundreds of dollars on you at all times. But what people say - and based on this first moment, I 100% buy it - is that the one way you can screw up in Japan is by over-relying on how "safe" it is and, for instance, going off with an attractive person trying to pick you up on a corner at 4 AM in the pleasure district corner of Kyoto.)

This uhhhh this is from the next day and there aren't any scam slash pickup artists in this shot, I just like trees and frames. (One thing that snaps into view on a trip like this is that Japanese culture got massively good at building frames and viewing environments to look at wild nature. Hi there's way too much to talk about and this post is losing focus instantaneously!)

Anyhow. I wandered through an empty, lantern-lit shinto shrine and a series of empty streets, at one point leapfrogging past a delivery man on a moped delivering glass bottles of milk to homes and businesses on the walk up to Kiyomizudera. I got to the temple just after 6, and in the next hour or two of exploring the grounds, maybe saw 8 people including the two who sold and checked my ticket. As dawn broke, more people arrived, but in those early hours, it was the perfect place to breathe, look out over the city, attend to the detail in the shaping of the plants in the gardens, the bright vermilion buildings against the fading brown forest, the - eventually - gently falling snow.

Being there as the temple woke up was a gift, basically. At one point, I'd passed a waterfall that splits into three streams; later in the day, crowds line up to file through and drink from one of the three streams (they promise health, love, or business success, if I recall correctly). At this time of day, there were only a few people standing about. I walked on for another thirty seconds or so when suddenly I heard chanting and bells behind me. Well, the cardinal rule of good travel: hear something interesting, change course. I doubled back and saw (you'll see a fragment in the video above) a half-dozen monks chanting sutras and ringing bells as they consecrated the stream for its day of blessings. A small crowd of Japanese tourists stood nearby filming; one woman, after the ceremony, impressed upon the eldest monk what looked like an elaborate gift basket that he reluctantly accepted.

Kiyomizudera, lurkin' behind some flowers. OH DID I MENTION THE FOLIAGE WAS EXTREMELY LOVELY FOR IT BEING LATE DECEMBER EARLY JANUARY?? Apparently having a very British-style climate (cold but not insanely cold, and damp forever) gives you very lush landscapes more of those soon I am sure.

And look. Travel writers get pious about this stuff all the time. What you miss by sleeping til 10, how to avoid the crowds, how to get an authentic experience. I don't know about all of that. I think there are days you need to sleep til noon, there are places and experiences you won't experience without swallowing your pride and following the herd, and the pursuit of authenticity is almost as narcissistic as the refusal to eat anywhere that doesn't have recognizably American food (whatever that is).

But this morning was a great little baptism back into the happy accidents of off-kilter moments on the road, of being up a bit earlier than made sense and getting a window into something special, and of feeling the time to breathe and rest and soak it in rather than start trying to Experience It All.

Ugh read the next paragraph for context on this, it's a bamboo grove and it's nice. Get over it!!!

As you'll see in the video above, I kept wandering for that day and evening and into the next morning. (Arashiyama Bamboo Grove is another place that is nigh-perfect to see at dawn.) But mostly what I want to reflect on here is how good it is to start slow, to breathe into a place, and to take the time to be there, fully, before deciding what comes next. Opening to the world and simply being.

Basically: I lost my earbuds within 15 minutes of leaving my guesthouse that first morning, and nothing could have been a better gift to my trip than that.

Sometimes you gotta take a break from your hike and photograph the massive statue towering over the city of Kyoto.
Them is the rules.