Day 5 in Japan: The Red gates and golden walls of Kyoto

The memory that sticks out to me as I sit down to write about our second day in Kyoto is that of our late-afternoon search for dinner somewhere south of the main train station. Ciaran and I were walking towards two ladies when their dog started arching its back to poop. Instead of waiting for the dog to finish and collecting the poop from the ground, one of the ladies held the dog with one hand to stop it from pacing around and used a tissue in her other hand to catch the dog’s poop before it even hit the ground.

We woke up at six o’clock in the morning hoping that we would be able to take some pictures of the red arches at Fushimi Inari Taisha before the crowds made it impossible to take a single snapshot without a backpack in it. As soon as we entered our train, however, we recognised this strategy had one major hole: it did not account for jetlag. The train arrived at Fushimi Inari Taisha and released a tsunami of tourists, all of whom dashed towards the arches with the same idea. Ciaran, who woke up in a much worse mood than I did, was ready to call it quits, but we persisted for some fifteen minutes, powering our way through the crowds until we found a few empty bends in which to take our pictures before shuffling down the mountain to our next destination – Kiyomizu-dera.

Kiyomizu-dera is a Buddhist monastery named after its supposedly wish-granting water. The monastery stands behind two red gates and a pagoda with three roofs. Its main building, with its giant, gently sloping roof, is supported by tall pillars where the cliff drops, opening onto a large wooden platform that overlooks the whole of Kyoto and the mountains on the other side of the city. The platform is known for an Edo-era tradition according to which a person would be granted their wish if they survived the thirteen-metre jump. Although most people did survive (85.4 per cent, according to one source), the practice was abolished in 1872. Nowadays, people ask for their wishes to be granted in a much tamer way: by catching water from one of three spouts into a jar fixed to a long stick and drinking it.

We descended from Kiyomizu-dera into Yasaka Kamimachi admiring the rhododendrons and other blossoming flowers along the way. After taking a few pictures of the Yasaka Pagoda, we ate ramen for breakfast, which I had “pre-gamed” with an irresistible soft-serve combination of matcha and sakura I had seen at one of the shops. Ciaran made fun of me for it, but he sure was glad that I was well-hydrated from the ice-cream when I let him have one of my water bottles.

As the sun rose and its rays fell punishingly on the red pates of bald men whose vanity had kept them from applying sunscreen on previous days, Ciaran and I armed ourselves with our umbrellas and began our walk north to the Heian Shrine. The amble led us through and past several temple complexes: the Yasaka Shrine, Chion-in, and Shorenin. Nearing the Heian Shrine, we passed through an intersection guarded by a giant red torii gate, whose legs spanned four lanes leading to a square with souvenir-sellers and snack vendors and the gateway building of the shrine itself. The inner courtyard of the Heian Shrine – a 5:8 replica of the no-longer-extant State Hall of the Imperial Palace built in 1895 on the 1100^th anniversary of the founding of Heiankyo – was smaller than I expected, but conversely, its gardens were so big that we decided to skip them. The rain had battered most of the cherry blossoms anyway.

From the Heian Shrine, we caught a bus to the Shimogamo Shrine. Or rather, we were meant to catch the bus to Shimogamo, but I accidentally brought us onto the wrong bus, and we had to get off at the next station. This mistake left my public transport card balance at zero, so we used our time waiting for the next bus to recharge our cards at a nearby convenience store. Shimogamo is a very peaceful shrine not yet overrun by hordes of tourists. It borders a lovely dense little forest with a narrow stream and contains temples dedicated to the gods associated with the Chinese zodiac. When a visitor comes to worship at the shrine, they generally pray at the temples associated with their birthyear.

It was early in the afternoon when we decided we would skip lunch due to our late big breakfast and continued – once again, by bus – to one of Kyoto’s most iconic sights, the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, or Kinkaku-ji. Dating to 1397, the temple belongs to the Zen Buddhist School, which is evident from the lake with little rocky islands scattered in a determinedly haphazard fashion. The walls of the temple on its shore are entirely plated with gold leaf symbolising the purification of the mind and the attainment of a “pure land” paradise. Its gardens are extensive. All covered in short and seemingly soft moss that gives them an air of still serenity, they contain a multitude of carefully manicured trees and flowering bushes. Something about this atmosphere must also affect the hordes of tourists, who seem almost miraculously disciplined when they reach the photo spots, taking a few pictures and then rotating out in an orderly fashion without spending an obnoxious amount of time trying to find the best shot.

We took our last bus ride of the day to Nijo Castle and nearly missed it because the bus was so full that we struggled to battle our way to the front. Kyoto’s busses work in a way that I find a little counterintuitive: people board through the middle door and pay on their way out of the front door, which means they must cross the entire bus once it has stopped, often delaying the journey for everyone else. Although we were the only people to alight from the bus at the stop closest to Nijo, we found the ticket machines beset by long queues. Inside, the situation was somewhat better, as Nijo’s grounds are quite considerable.

Nijo Castle was founded by order of Tokugawa Ieyasu in 1601 and completed by his grandson Tokugawa Iemitsu twenty-five years later. The castle was where Tokugawa Ieyasu announced his appointment as shogun to Japan’s feudal lords in 1603 and where, in 1867, the fifteenth Shogun Tokugawa Yoshinobu announced his resignation and the end of the Shogunate by returning power to the emperor. The castle’s main attraction is the Ninomaru-goten Palace with its golden screens full of tigers and leopards in some rooms, and cranes and trees in others. It is also known for its “nightingale floors,” which make chirping noises when people walk over their boards. This has led to the popular and colourful misconception that the design was meant to alert guards to the presence of intruders, but more likely the sound is just an unforeseen result of clamps grinding against nails within the wooden beams supporting the floor.

With the time approaching four o’clock, we found ourselves having seen everything on our list for the day. It was a bit too late to board a bus or train to another attraction, as most of them close at five, so we decided to walk around the nearby Kyoto Gyoen National Garden, which is the site of the Kyoto Sento Imperial Palace and the Kyoto Imperial Palace, as well as being a large park in its own right. With our little excursion finished, we took the train down to near Kyoto Station in the hopes of finding dinner, but it took four or five tries until we found a place that was not fully reserved. It was our first time at an izakaya, and we used the opportunity to order ourselves a bunch of little vegetable dishes to make up for the lack of fibre in our diet.