Japan 2012: Kyoto

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

Anyone familiar with the Japanese mindset where sites of national significance and coloured leaves are concerned would know it's a good idea to get in early before the crowds start to arrive, and given the fact that the two sites Madam had pencilled in for our only full day in Kyoto lay around nine and a half kilometres from the CBD it should come as no surprise to learn that we were queuing for the Number 8 bus outside Karasuma Station well before the scheduled 7:22 departure.

The crowds were going to increase as the day went on, and it seemed logical to assume a fair swag of them would be travelling out on later services on the same route.

The journey out through the regulation urban landscape was mostly uneventful, though it took a while to pass through a particularly notorious intersection, and shortly thereafter we were winding our way up into the foothills, alighting from the bus around 8:15 and turning our thoughts towards the morning's route march.

Madam has had plenty of time to figure out the paths down which Hughesy's mind is likely to wander, so having landed close to the temple at Jingo-ji, a venue that would, I was told, involve an unspecified degree of climbing, the first thing on her agenda was to determine whether a walk to the other option (Kozan-ji) was doable.

The maps and other data available on the ground weren't particularly helpful as far as administrative details like distances were concerned, so she went for the nearest available human source, a middle-aged woman, obviously a local, sweeping up leaves.

No problem, she was told. It's a fifteen minute walk. At least, that's the version I was given. Since the conversation was in Japanese she could have decided to recast any information that had been given and I would have been none the wiser.

But a fifteen minute walk certainly seemed doable, and while there were concerns expressed about the state of Hughesy's feet I was determined to soldier on and cover whatever distance was required. It was, after all, the last bit of sightseeing for the trip.

As we set out along a relatively deserted back road that showed signs of imminent crowds, it was a pleasant and surprisingly tranquil stroll through autumn tones across a river valley and up and down the slopes on either side of the stream. Eight-thirty was, it seemed, a trifle early for the people who operated the various sightseer-oriented businesses along the way to be starting the day's business, but there were signs along the way that they'd be starting to set up in the not too distant future.

As I walked, in between stopping to enjoy the views while someone lagged along behind capturing the interplay between light and leaves, I meditated on something approximating Zen and the art of walking with sore feet.

If you walk long enough, I figured, you're going to end up with sore feet. It's part of the deal, and the more you think about your feet, the worse they'll feel, particularly in situations where you can use them as an excuse to get out of walking any further.

So the answer is to avoid thinking about the feet at all. Focus on the walk, the act of walking and the scenery you're walking through.

So I did, and a thoroughly enjoyable time was had up to the time when the riverside back road joined the main road just before Kozan-ji. That meant a few minutes' careful treading along the side of the road while the traffic moved past within army's length.

That sort of thing had worried me four and a half years ago when I'd been heading to and from the hotel in Hakone, but after two weeks of negotiating backstreets where the traffic comes and goes this time around I merely exercised a bit of caution and waited for a break in the traffic flow if it looked like things were getting a little too close for comfort.

In any case it was only a couple of hundred metres before we hit the entrance to Kozan-ji, another of those uphill tree-lined avenues completely bereft of vehicular traffic. I'd just settled back into Zen and the art of walking when a god almighty racket from over on my right cut into the tranquility.

A bus full of elderly Japanese sightseers had pulled into the car park and was busily disgorging its load. Fortunately, I thought, this would mean they'd have to go down to the entrance we'd used to get us off the road, so I could maintain a comfortable degree of separation between myself and the racket.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. I rounded a curve that brought me within sight of the booth where you pay your ¥500 admission fee, looked to my right and there they were, heading right towards the same point along a converging track.

I was pretty quick about paying the admission fee once Madam had caught up, and was pretty smart about getting comfortably ahead of the chattering mass.

The walk up to the temple complex itself, once they'd been left behind, was a pleasant ramble, and once I got there and we were comfortably removed from the clamouring crowd we were right into the full Zen monks in the forest ambience, hardly surprising since the mountains around Togano, which are justly famous for their autumn foliage, have a long tradition of mountain asceticism, and there have been many small temples among the ancient cedar and maple trees in the back woods.

Temples in the area are said to date back to imperial orders issued by Emperor Kōnin in 774, but Kōzan-ji (formally Toganōsan Kōsan-ji) was officially founded by scholar and monk Myōe (1173 – 1232) who served at nearby Jingo-ji before he was granted the land to construct a temple by Emperor Go-Toba in 1206.

There may already have been a temple on the site with Myōe doing a restoration job, but there's a diagram housed at Jingo-ji drawn in 1230, showing the thirteenth century layout of the temple, which consisted of a large gate, a main hall, a three-storied pagoda, halls dedicated to Amitabha and Lohan, a bell tower, a scripture hall (originally the residence of a member of the Imperial family), and a Shinto shrine.

Structures on the site have been destroyed numerous times by fire and war and the oldest buildings standing today is the scripture hall, now known as Sekisui-in and Myōe's former residence, two of the few remaining examples of Kamakura Era architecture, with a roof of thatch and shingles.

The grounds also hold the oldest tea field in Japan, planted by Myoe with seeds brought from China by the Zen priest Eisai. Tea helped monks stay awake during late-night meditation.

Kōzan-ji is home to numerous national treasures and important cultural properties though most of them of them are currently on loan to museums in Kyoto and Tokyo. The Chōjū-jinbutsu-giga (The Scroll of Frolicking Animals and Humans), a set of four picture scrolls of ink paintings from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, sometimes described as Japan's first comic, that takes the mickey out of human foibles by showing frogs, monkeys, birds, and rabbits engaged in worldly pursuits. The original is currently housed in Tokyo National Museum but apparently there are precise replicas on display on site. I say apparently because I was more interested in the ambience among the towering cedar trees and moss-covered ground than checking out areas that were likely to attract a crowd.

Heading back down the hill I wasn't exactly looking forward to our other temple visit since the morning was getting on and there were obvious expectations of substantial crowds among the roadside merchandisers. Most of the stall holders had just about finished setting up as we retraced our tracks along the riverside side road, and when we made it back to the original starting point it looked like we were in for another experience in crowded sightseeing.


Fortunately, the old monks who set about establishing these temples were careful to locate them where visitors would need to make a bit of effort and whoever founded Jingo-ji must have liked his peace and quiet because he positioned the place at the top of a series of fairly steep climbs.

The first one was enough to sort out the sheep from the mountain goats and would, I thought around the halfway point, be enough to deter most of the Kozan-ji chatterers. Those that weren't put off by the incline would be having issues with breathlessness by the time they made it to the top of that particular climb.

The top of that climb featured a little eatery affair where sightseers could stop for refreshment, and there was another fairly steep set of steps thereafter, with refreshment stops thoughtfully provided along the way, before a sharp turn revealed another set of steps that needed to be negotiated.

Sore feet and straining leg muscles are likely to kick in with a vengeance in such circumstances, but a combination of Zen and the art of walking and an absorption with the mechanics of the stride pattern kept those issues in the background.

Along the way I passed a TV camera crew filming an elderly woman in a yellow top and black tights and a much younger female making their way up the final incline to the temple complex.

This, subsequent questioning revealed once The Photographer had caught up (I was comfortably ahead of the camera crew by this stage since they were doing reruns of particular bits of uphill walks from different angles) was a significant Japanese actress from the generation before mine making a filmgrimage around the best spots in the country for coloured leaves on one of those holiday shows.

That means there's a possibility, albeit a very slight one, of a black capped hairy foreigner, head down in Zen and the art of monitoring your stride pattern mode passing the said filmgrimage on the way up appearing on Japanese network TV, with the equally absurd proposition of a sighting as he cowers in a nook beside the ticket booth waiting for his native-speaking accomplice to catch up.

Actually, from there I must admit the presence of the crew did a bit to dampen my enthusiasm as I tried to work things so I stayed out of shot. Once we'd paid our admission fee, I worked around where they were working, passing a couple of impressively weather beaten structures before I found myself at the foot of yet another set of steps leading up to the Kondo, which houses an image of Yakushi Nyorai, the Buddha of Healing.

Sitting on top of Mount Takao to the northwest of the downtown Kyoto at the top of a long flight of stairs, Jingo-ji dates back to 824 and a merger, instituted by statesman Wake no Kiyomaro, of two private temples founded earlier. They were Jingan-ji in Kiyomaro's home province (present day Osaka Prefecture) and Takaosan-ji, founded on the current site in 781. The combined temple was named Jingokokusoshingon-ji (Shingon temple for divine protection of the country) and Kukai (774-835), the founder of the Shingon sect, was named as the head priest.

Like most significant sites, buildings at Jingo-ji have been destroyed by fire and war over the years. The original structures were rebuilt in 1184 after being burnt down but most were destroyed again in the Onin War. Only the Daishido survived and several of the current buildings date from a major reconstruction commissioned by Itakura Katsushige, a daimyo and former Kyoto shoshidai in the Tokugawa shogunate, in 1623.

Another reconstruction took place in the 1930s.

Madam was having the time of her life capturing images of coloured leaves, and by the time she'd caught up the camera crew, who'd skipped the structures I'd just passed, we're making their way up the stairs before me. Madam was all for heading up that way herself, but the prospect of further climbing along with the camera-dodging had me deciding to make my way back to the approaches to the temple and spend the time gazing at the multicoloured hillsides.

And if you're calling me a sook on the strength of that last decision, it's Mister Sook, thank you very much.

Iif I’d done a bit of research before arrival I would have taken myself over to the Jizo Hall, located above the Kiyotaki River where you can buy clay cups (kawarakenage) to throw off the adjacent cliff (kin'unkei) to rid yourself of bad karma. At ¥100 for two, that seems like a rather economical way to achieve that aim, but it only works (or so the on-line research suggests) if you can get the disk all the way down to the river. Flick the discs very gently, convex side up, like a Frisbee.

If only I'd known...

It took a while, but eventually Madam made her way back to where I was standing and we began the descent, predictably a much quicker process than the uphill one, though there were delays along the way as images worth capturing presented themselves in the changing light.

There were a couple of places where the conformation of the stairs permitted a rapid descent, with a single stride covering the whole of a step that needed a stride and a bit on the way up, but things were tempered by the frequent need to stop, look around and ascertain how far Someone Else had progressed.

Back at the foot of the whole thing I paused yet again, and when the touring party had again attained a quorum inquired whether there was anything else on the agenda.

No, I was told, there wasn't, unless I was inclined to eat.

Since we'd set out before breakfast and hadn't managed to find it along the way, the prospect of food was definitely tempting, but there was one more ascent needed to get us back up to the bus stop, and I wasn't sure how frequently the buses ran. There was a packet of raisin bread rolls we'd bought the night before in the backpack which would, I figured, have to be eaten some time, so my take on the situation was get ourselves up the hill, check, out the bus times, and eat if possible.

That packet of raisin rolls would have to be eaten somewhere, and it was highly likely we'd have a lengthy wait once the ascent had been made.

That was, as it turned out, close to the situation we found when we arrived. There was about half an hour until the next Kyoto Bus, but a JR bus would be heading up from Kozan-ji in about five minutes. There was already a fair sized queue for that one, and since it had started elsewhere there was no guarantee we'd get a seat on the forty-five minute trip back into the city.

That was the way it turned out once the bus arrived, and so we headed over to the rival stop, positioned ourselves at the front of the queue and bunched on the packet of raisin rolls. Once the bus arrived we picked up the same Hughesy's legs friendly seats we'd had on the way up and, incidentally, sailed straight through the difficult intersection that had slowed things down significantly on the way up.

The bus dropped us off just past the hotel, and once we were there the thoughts, predictably, turned to lunch. It was around one by this stage, and updates on the Sponge situation suggested we'd be eating late when it came to the evening meal, so lunch was a matter of some urgency.

A packet of raisin bread rolls is all very well, but after significant exercise with the prospect of a night on the turps you need something substantial in the way of lunch. There was a ramen place marked on the Eateries around the neighbourhood map Madam had procured from the Front Desk, so we headed off in that direction. There was, however, a perfectly acceptable alternative just around the corner that did exactly what was required.

Back at the hotel again, Madam needed to head off to do a bit of shopping while Hughesy sat in the lobby, doing what needed to be done on line before heading back upstairs for further travelogue tapping.

We weren't expecting any further Sponge updates until well after six-thirty, since the day's show in Himeji had involved road, rather than rail transport, which in turn meant they had to drive back, unpack the van, head home and make subsequent arrangements once they'd touched base there.

Eventually, however, the rendezvous was arranged for the East Gate at Karasuma station, so we headed along there around eight, and by twenty past were headed off for a return visit to the place we'd spent the equivalent evening four and a half years earlier.

This time around the dramatis personae were the inimitable Sponge, the young lass we'd christened Double Sponge, and Take, an enthusiastic young bloke who announced himself to be Triple Sponge, but didn't quite manage to live up to the self-proclaimed status. Mind you, given the capacity of his colleagues, most people would experience a degree of difficulty in that department.

By the same token, it was a late start, and with the regulation array of platters on the table things flowed along nicely without hitting any great heights in the alcoholic consumption department and the trio's need to catch the final train for the evening meant that most of us probably ended up in bed in much better shape than would otherwise have been the case.