Creature Comforts

After getting back from Japan a few weeks ago, I started my writing day by working through the pictures and notes to capture a rough sense of how I found Kyoto.  Joining me on the trip, and the reason for going, was my big sis, Meret.  Kyoto’s a great city, so I hope you’ll enjoy this three part series.  The idea is to keep things short and conversational.

Part 1

This massive shrine complex shared the block with our first Ryokan.

The first night, we stayed at the Three Sister’s Ryokan Annex.  Essentially a bed-and-breakfast, the ryokan has been a Kyoto mainstay for centuries.  I spent a morning in Taipei online and on the phone working the details out.  I tend to just land in a city and see what I can find (very often love hotels).  When we rolled our luggage over the thin carpet and down a tight, crooked hallway, the uneven ways different sections of the flooring seem to have been hitched together really made me think “Annex.”  But the guesthouse, hidden from the street by a typically Japanese garden path, had its charms.  Outside our room, with careful hands they’d filled the patch of grounds that held the water pipes and air conditioners with bushes and spritely plants, making the space into a simple Japanese garden.  Where the rain gutter emptied, a stoney pond would fill and flow below a little bridge.

Without knowing it, I’d hurriedly picked a upscale ryokan from internet reviews that happened to be in one corner of the block occupied mostly by the enormous Heian Shrine and it’s expanses of public gardens.  Our ryokan was tucked just behind the massive concrete retaining wall that contained the parks and ran right up to the road.  The forest canopy hung just overhead and as we trudged with our luggage the coolness of the dark interior poured down.  I took the above picture that night, before we knew what the Heian Shrine was or realized that we were sleeping in the crook of its side.  So much Kyoto right away.

The Hakusasonso Pagoda

The next day, on the way to the first UNESCO site we were to see, the Ginkakuji, we stopped by the Hakusasonso Villa, former home of famous gibon-painter Kansetsu Hashimoto.  The website boasted a five-stage garden, but in mid-summer, the lush greens we found were pretty neglected and sprouting disorderly.  Meret took solace, though, in learning first-hand that Japanese tourists amble, get in your way, and in general putz even when at home. Everyone was busy taking their personal best shots at garden pictures, thirty or so people crammed in the garden of a former artist trying to look past one another.  Tripods on the stone bridge and close-ups of blossoms.  The museum, a small space with perhaps twelve of the great artist’s rough sketches, galley copies, and unfinished works, was a real disappointment.  The stone pagoda (above) was the highlight despite being at the very entrance.  Also pictured is a young Japanese guy, who kicking the moss and milling around, refused to get out of my shot of a stone lantern.

A lantern tucked into a corner of the garden, and Oblivious-san doing his thing.

The former residences were first temple halls. Now, they're UNESCO-groomed and empty.

The Ginkakuji is one of Kyoto’s biggest tourist attractions - the impressive mountain villa was once the retirement home of the 8th Muramachi Sogunate.  For a Zen temple, the buildings are impractical.  It was a common practice to convert an aristocratic villa into a Zen temple after their death, and Kyoto is studded with grand mansions reimagined as a final karmic booster shot to help ensure the military man wouldn’t reap the rewards of a life of politics and end up reborn as a bedbug, earwig, or stubborn case of ringworm.  The main feature of the Ginkakuji is the Silver Pavilion, pictured here under construction.

Ginkakuji's Silver Pavilion

Ginkakuji's Zen Sand Sculpture

The most striking thing about Ginkakuji is the sand sculpture, which achieves a near-epic definance of nature in the way only Zen can pull off.  Over the field of ribbed, cured sand, hornest had dug dozens of burrows, and were swarming noisily just abpve the surface, circling looping [aths around one another over hole after hole.  It had the feeling of a cloud of flies attacking a table cloth at a picnic.  The sand they dug out wet was brown and made a striking contrast.  I'm pictured making notes in my book.

Your Author, Authorin' Stuff

At Ootoyo-Jinju, a Shinto shrine, we prayed to the mouse and monkey spirits for wealth, but in a misunderstanding, I ended up getting an excess of spare change rattling around in my pockets instead of the vast wealth I’d expected.  An inexact art.  Here’s Meret drinking lucky water while holding a bottle bought from a vending machine down the lane from the temple, which is a special tourist moment and pretty much priceless.

Meret Drinks of the Sacred Well

The temple itself was really more a village of shrines, each very house-like with gates and fences.  To ring the bell and pray, you need to step into a personal interior.  In Taiwan, Taoist shrines are sticky with incense grime and made from bits of the tile and plaster that goes into the apartment buildings.  Inside, the Taoist idols have bright plastic faces, and along with their gold-threaded brocades and wigs made of real hair, have a slightly creepy lost-in-the-attic-at-night feel.  At Ootoyo-Jinju, moss was growing over the mouse’s worn granite claws, seeds were stuck in the letters of the milestone, and trees leaned against the wooden houses.  The impression was of the natural world entirely apart and exceptional from humanity.

The main shrine, to the mouse, at Oootoyo-Jinju

The first 24 hours in Kyoto, discovering its canal-side paths and fields of slate-grey temple roofs, defined the city for me later.  Cool for June, the streets and shops all neat and well-in-order.  A city at peace.