City of Living History

Kyoto sprawls outward from the central train station in a stark contrast of modernity layered onto ancient foundations of architecture, culture and art. Dense webs of powerlines sprawl over narrow streets where shopfronts overflow with traditional craft in a dangerous sort of heaven. In one storefront near our hotel, women sew finishing touches into bamboo blinds, twisted ever so slightly to work delicate zig zag patterns into the screens. In another shop, column upon column of drawers filled with rice paper line the walls. Some bear designs based on wood-block prints, some are simple origami, some patterned for tea canisters, some screen-printed and others high-quality calligraphy paper.

We wander down a busy main street lit by little lanterns and find 400-year-old shops selling ferushkis­­– traditional carry cloths, with designs ranging from old, to modern meditative, to cats. Lots and lots of cats. We find a small shop selling hand-carved hair ornaments, lacquered and layered in wood and abalone. Further down the street, a man carries forward his father’s traditional craft of creating lamps and lighting fixtures from bent bamboo and paper.

One block north of Shijo Dori, a narrow covered lane brims with busy energy under a red and green and yellow-stained ceiling. Nishiki Dori, the city's market for pretty much anything in the world food-related, bursts with stalls selling specialty items. Green tea bracken rice cakes pile high on plates next to stores dedicated to chopstick rests. A little boy pulls his mom toward candied octopus on a stick. Packaged tins of sweets line walls, pickled cucumbers smothered in sake blanket bamboo display counters and oysters are fried over coals in their own shells. Shining glass cases display cuts of fish, sliced into sashimi only after a patron has discussed in length and paid for each specific piece.

We turn into the Gion after dusk, finding our way down dark, twisting alleys. Round, red lanterns and totems crafted from rice paper and twisted straw guard doors shielded by norin­– vertically split fabric drapes. Long, slender shades obscure upper windows. Small women in bright kimono, faces painted white and hair arranged just so, scurry amongst the alleys before disappearing into houses. Sleek, dark cars and dark-suited businessmen own the streets. From a corner building the sound of raucous laughter leaks into the night as hostesses fawn over patrons in the district’s more modern version of a gentleman’s club.

We step off the train the next morning across the street from Fushimi Inari, where twisting flights of light gray stone stairs lead ever upward through thousands upon thousands of iconic orange tori gates. The gates, marked by size and inscription to signify monetary donations given to the shrine, create tunnels of orange as they wind to the top of the mountain after passing an initial monster of a shrine. As the path rises, tori gates give way to smaller family shrines tucked into the woodland to the side, each guarded by stone or porcelain foxes. As the sun breaks, morning light begins streaming between the gates. Light catches mist as it rises from the mountain’s surface, and we find our way back to the train through the day’s arriving crowds.

We continue on to Osaka, where I break off with my uncle to search out the tiniest of specialty ceramic brush shops tucked into the side of a small back street. Between a stroll over a bridge that reminds me a bit of Chicago, and Edo translating the gentle man’s explanations and demonstrations of his wares, we manage to fit in some conversation to catch up over the last ten years. The slightly stilted awkwardness we encountered during my arrival to Tokyo vanishes by the time we rejoin the rest of my family. For me, that in itself makes the trip back across the ocean worth it.

We find our way into the Bunraku. The age-old art, for which apprenticeship begins no later than 15 years of age, gives an otherworldly essence to puppetry through subtle movement and synchronized breathing amongst multiple puppetmasters, achieved through decades upon decades of training. Black-robed puppetmasters breathe life into the characters they control, dancing and bowing and spinning and fighting into fantastical scenes borne of legend and lore, emotion made electric with the aid of singing narrators and three-stringed guitars stretched tight with cat skin. Over the course of an afternoon we find ourselves party to tragedies, dances, and mortal fights, souls drawn into the sagas of demons and warriors; princesses and housewives; maidens and bumbling priests.

We eat that evening at a little restaurant where hundreds upon hundreds of dishes stack high against the wall behind a sushi-style bar. The round-faced hostess talks us through the evening’s options, piled high in deep round bowls atop the long, slender counter. “Octopus?” she asks. “Duck in dumpling?” Make us a meal, we tell her, once she figures out what we can (and can’t) eat. Under the cheerful chefs’ watchful gazes– and emphatic corrections when we begin to eat the food wrong– we feast.

We find our way into the maze of Kiomizudera’s preserved hillside neighborhood the next morning, joined by half the world’s people plus another dozen as we amble up a twisting street toward the temple’s towering orange pagoda. We find a small indigo shop tucked to the side, where a soft-spoken gentleman talks us through his craft: this was made with paper cut-out resist, this was dyed with persimmon, this was dipped time and time again into the indigo vats to create subtle gradients from deep, soul-snaring midnight blue to blinding white. Further up the road, layered beneath chintzy tourist fans and sandals and beach towels, we find traditional Japanese purses and kitchen craft next to shops full of designer umbrellas.

From the pagoda’s panoramic view of Kyoto city, situated beneath hills now blazing red in full autumn foliage, we descend into a neighborhood where golden cranes take flight from pagoda towers, rising above dark-tiled roofs tight-packed in an ancient jigsaw puzzle. The street spits us out into a wide courtyard containing a shrine where row upon row of oversized white paper lanterns creak as they sway in tandem under the day’s crisp breeze. Booths lining the exit hawk crispy, scorching taiyaki—grilled fish-shaped doughnuts filled with sweet bean paste.

That evening we manage to track down a shop called Zohiko, a kind of marriage between showroom and museum for the most beautiful of laquerware. I lose myself for a time in a world of black and red ink, gold leaf and dust, abalone and wood inlay. I find plates and trays, calligraphy boxes and tea jars and hair combs. I step into scenes of cherry trees and mountain journeys, free-flying birds, blooming irises, gentle seas and wandering warriors.

We spend our last morning in Kyoto at the the Buddhist temple of Kinkaku-ji, where a gleaming, three-story golden pavilion rises over a broad pond’s still, glossy water. Even under opaque cloud, the pavilion glows. Bright violet irises emerge tall from the pond and thousands upon thousands of crisp, miniature crimson maple leaves contrast against pine trees’ deep gentle green as we make our way through the temple’s surrounding gardens. 

Before leaving the city for Tokyo, we stop at an indigo shop tucked into an unobtrusive street in a quiet neighborhood. Inside, a quiet man dressed in deep blue robes oversees the dying process while his wife, clothed in a sleek black dress and showy pearls, designs clothing from his fabric that often ends up in national museums. Their shopfront brims with silk and cotton scarves, handbags and shirts, meticulously woven from dyed threads and lined with antique cloth.

The man leads us to the back of his workshop, where chest-high vats hold a mixture of deep blue dye with added limestone to aid the curing process. “Sometimes we dip fabric 100 times for the deep color,” he tells us. Later, sat on broad tatami mats inside his “museum,” he holds a flame to a small patch of dark cloth. The cloth slowly curls into itself and disappears under the flame’s touch, leaving indigo behind in the clay dish. “Indigo never burns,” he notes. His dye-stained hands hold out a heavy antique firefighter’s robe, made of hand-stitched cotton and dyed so deep a blue as to be almost black. This one, he says, took over a year to complete.

And so we say good bye to Kyoto and return northward. We spend two last days perusing streets jammed with and fabric stores and eating noodle soup at corner shops where white-capped chefs toss dough into long, slender strings by the meter behind broad windows. I find an entire wall of vegetable-shaped vibrators in a discount electronics store. We do some shopping and cram our faces with scorching fish pastries and green tea slushies. I find a couple of Daruma Dolls (the meditating man who sat so long in one place his arms fell off; used in modern days as a reminder of perseverance) and tuck them into my bags.

That evening, for the last time in three years, I step onto a plane to cross the Pacific.