Kyoto rewards patience. Tokyo is loud and Osaka is louder, but Kyoto whispers, and the whisper is more interesting than the shout.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Five days is not enough to see Kyoto. It never is. But it is enough to fall into its rhythm, and the rhythm is the thing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I arrive on the bullet train from Tokyo, two hours and ten minutes that feel like twenty, and step out of Kyoto Station into a city that has decided modernity is optional. The station itself is a steel-and-glass cathedral. Walk five minutes south and you are in narrow streets of wooden machiya houses with sliding paper doors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My ryokan is in Gion, the old geisha district, fifteen minutes from the station by taxi. The owner \u2014 a woman in her sixties named Mrs. Tanaka \u2014 bows when I arrive and asks if I would like tea. I say yes. She brings sencha and a small sweet bean cake and we communicate, despite my zero Japanese and her limited English, perfectly well about nothing in particular for ten minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the late afternoon I walk through Higashiyama, the eastern hills, up Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka \u2014 the two preserved stone streets \u2014 toward Kiyomizu-dera, the great wooden temple that overhangs the cliff. I am too tired for the full climb. I sit at the base of the pagoda and watch the light change for forty minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You have seen pictures of Arashiyama’s bamboo grove. They do not lie. The grove is real and the light is otherworldly. They also do not tell you that by 10 AM there are six hundred other tourists in it with you, all trying to get the same picture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The trick, as with most things in Kyoto, is timing. Be there at 6:30 AM. The buses do not run yet but a taxi is twelve dollars from central Kyoto, and you will have the grove to yourself for an hour. The light through the bamboo at sunrise is, briefly, what the photos promised.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Afterward, walk along the Hozugawa River to Tenry\u016b-ji temple, which has a Zen garden designed in 1339 and largely unchanged since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent the rest of the morning in a small Arashiyama caf\u00e9 drinking matcha and watching the cat that lived there sleep on the windowsill. I did not feel guilty about this. The cat was excellent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If you go to one shrine in Kyoto, make it Fushimi Inari \u2014 the one with the thousands of vermillion torii gates winding up Mount Inari. The full hike to the summit takes two hours round-trip. Most tourists turn back after the first photo opportunity, which means the upper portions of the trail are nearly empty.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I left at 5 AM (yes, again \u2014 Kyoto rewards the early riser more than any city I know) and was at the summit by 6:30. The sun came up through the gates. I cried, a little, which was unexpected.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For lunch, I walked back down and found a small sushi counter near the JR station where the chef spoke no English and I spoke no Japanese, and we communicated by him preparing a piece, me eating it, both of us nodding, and him preparing the next one. Twelve pieces, an hour, the best sushi of my life. I have no idea what was in any of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The afternoon was tea, properly. I had booked a tea ceremony at a small studio in Gion that introduces foreigners to the tradition without being patronizing. An hour of silence, hot water, whisked matcha, and an unexpectedly profound conversation about the philosophy of imperfection. The tea host’s name was Ayako. I am still thinking about what she said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Philosopher’s Path is a two-kilometer canal-side walking trail through northern Higashiyama, named for the Kyoto University philosopher Kitar\u014d Nishida who walked it daily to think. Cherry trees line the canal \u2014 in late March or early April it is unbearably beautiful, but in any season it is the best walk in Kyoto.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walked it slowly, stopping at the small temples that branch off \u2014 H\u014dnen-in, Anraku-ji, Eikan-d\u014d \u2014 and ended at Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion, which is gold-colored. (The name was aspirational. The silver leaf was never applied. The Japanese have a word for things that are beautiful precisely because they are incomplete: wabi-sabi.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Late afternoon I went to Daitoku-ji, a complex of Zen temples that is less famous than the others and consequently less crowded. I sat in a 16th-century rock garden for an hour. Two monks walked past, did not look at me, did not need to. A bell rang somewhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My train was at 4 PM. I had the morning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I spent it at Nishiki Market \u2014 Kyoto’s covered food market, six blocks of small stalls selling pickles, fish, knives, sweets, tea \u2014 and ate my way through it. A small skewer of grilled eel. A handful of preserved plums. A cup of soy milk pudding. A bowl of udon at a counter shared with three salarymen on their lunch break.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walked back to my ryokan past the Kyoto Imperial Palace, said goodbye to Mrs. Tanaka, and took the subway to Kyoto Station. The bullet train pulled in exactly on time. Of course it did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Three things I did not expect to take home:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The relationship between silence and beauty. Kyoto’s temples are quiet not because nobody is there but because everyone there is being quiet on purpose. It is a collaborative silence. You feel it the moment you enter and you become part of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The seasonality of everything. Every menu changes monthly. Every shrine has a different festival each season. Even the wagashi sweets are designed to look like the flowers currently in bloom. The Japanese assumption is that paying attention to what season it is, in a small way, every day, is one of the points of being alive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That getting up early is the cheat code. Most of what people complain about in Kyoto \u2014 the crowds, the queues, the impossibility of seeing it without a hundred selfies in your photos \u2014 is solved by being awake at 5 AM. The city is yours then.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I will go back. Probably in autumn next time. Probably for longer than five days. Some places ask you to return, and Kyoto is one of them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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