There’s a famous path in Kyoto, on the eastern edge of the city, called the Philosopher’s Walk. It starts up north, around Ginkakuji, the Temple of the Silever Pavillion, and meanders along a canal until you reach Nanzen-ji in the south. It’s not a very long walk, though if you stop in at all the sights along the way it can be very long indeed. I have no idea who named it the Philosopher’s Walk (none of my books have any information as to the origins of that term, though I’m guessing it has something to do with, um, philosophers wandering around the canal), but, having done the southern half of the trip, it seems like a very nice walk indeed.

I got up early this morning to change hotels and visit the Imperial Palace. You have to make reservations in advance to get there; mine were made last month, and are free. It was a painless procedure and I highly recommend it — you get a ticket you print out, with a bar code, and they scan it and away you go. Apparently it’s also possible to do walk-ups and get on tours, but given the number of people I saw on mine this is not an approach I recommend. English tours are given twice a day, at 10:00 and 14:00. The upshot of this is that you will meet lots and lots of English-speaking people here — whether this is a net positive or not is an open question in and of itself. I ran into a couple from DC, a landscape architect and his wife, who were over doing some occupational travel (he was looking at gardens and said he was bored stiff). Nice people; we wandered around the Palace grounds, dawdling behind the main body of the tour, though his questions of me and my camera (he got the idea in his head I was a professional photographer, on assignment, I guess because I was carrying three lenses and burned through three rolls of film in his presence) regarding him and his camera made me think that perhaps more people should read instruction manuals and/or take a basic photography class. The middle of Kyoto during a busy tour group isn’t really the best time or place to go into an intricate discussion of depth of field, aperature priority timing, shutter speeds, and the virtues of program-AE (if you’re a brain-dead slob like me). I guess if you know your system inside and out, and use lens hoods, people really do think you’re a professional photographer. (Note that this would come back to bite me later in the day in a particularly dramatic way.)

The group was being lead by a small woman with a microphone — helpful, but kind of hard to hear. The tour, 50 minutes long by my watch, covers the main sights within the inner compound but unfortunately does not include the inside of any buildings. I’ve never been to Buckingham Palace so I don’t know how this tour compares, but I’d say it’s like being let inside the gates and told to stay on the path. But: You do get to visit the Emporer’s private garden, which was.. gorgeous isn’t the right word for it. This is one of the reasons why I burned through three rolls of film before 11:00 this morning. “Kawaii desu ne?” is a very useful phrase to remember when visiting gardens. I used it frequently today.

Had lunch at a cafeteria in the outer palace grounds, which have a serious pidgeon problem. Fat, lazy, and brave pidgeons dot the park — so lazy, in fact, they look dead until you walk right up to them, at which point they sort of loll over, regard you casually, and, in a huff, fluff their wings up and shift their weight around. At no point did any bird I challenged actually get up to move out of my way. Like the crows in Ueno Park, they seem to belong, but I think Hermes said it best: “Shoo! Get away, ya filthy bird!” They’re pidgeons. They’re airborne rats.

Kyoto is a very, very old city. The bits that are old are really old; my ryokan from Sunday night was located in what used to be the red light district — in the 17th century. (Alas, this sounds more interesting than it really is; there are markers that commemorate this fact and the events that occurred in and around the area, but they can be appreciated by an English-speaking person only in the abstract since the descriptions and explanations are only in Japanese.) Owing to its cultural significance Kyoto was spared from Allied (read: American) bombing in WWII and so the concrete ugliness you see around town developed organically instead of being the result of 1950s reconstruction projects. Whereas Tokyo’s concrete is sometimes interesting, Kyoto’s concrete is generally pretty blah. Kyoto makes up for it with roughly a zillion other things.

One of the nicest old things in the city is the Heian Shrine (Heian-jingu), out towards the Philosopher’s Walk. From a distance you can see the huge orange torii looming over the street; up close, it’s even more impressive. The shrine itself is another 500 meters up the street, even though the torii itself is considered the entrance to the place. Brilliant shades of vermillion and green shine down on you from every structure; on super bright days (like today was, at times), these can combine with the shrine’s white gravel to create dizzying effects — one which requires good sunglasses to fully appreciate. You can walk around the shrine’s buildings for free, and, just like at Meiji-jingu in Tokyo, it is a real shrine that’s suitable for making offerings and prayers. The real treat to Heian-jingu, though, costs Y600 and is off to the side of the main building.

Now, let me say first that I am not a garden person. I live in a city with an internationally famous garden but, much to the amusement of my out of town friends, have never been. Roughly half of the people I meet while traveling who find out I’m from Victoria ask me about Butchart, and I can almost always get a laugh out of them by saying that “I’m sure it must be nice, but I’ve never actually been.” On the basis of what I did today, wandering around Kyoto, perhaps I should open the wallet and fork out for the trip at some point in the not-too-distant future, ’cause that’s how I spent my afternoon. 90 minutes in Heian-jingu’s gardens flew by, along with another two rolls of film. I actually switched to black and white at one point because I wanted to save the color stuff for later in the day. You can read a bit more about Heian-jingu’s gardens over here; the text doesn’t really do it justice, I’m afraid, and you’ll just have to wait for my pictures.

Toyo had said that Nanzen-ji was within walking distance of Heian-jingu. “Sure,” I had replied, somewhat snidely. “Everything’s within walking distance if you have lots of time.” But it turns out that Nanzen-ji really is within easy walking distance; Kyoto, for a city of 1.2 million people, is remarkably compact, without a lot of the obvious density that comes with packing that many people that tightly. This may be the result of Tokyo having inured me to crowds, and after yesterday’s madhouse I may be beyond caring at this point. But curiously this place feels about a million times smaller, and more intimate, than Tokyo. Which may just be a testament to Tokyo’s hugeness. I don’t know. Anyway, point being: If you want to see the interesting things in Okazaki (biologists and biochemists will think a street named Okazaki-dori is funny; the rest of you won’t care), or any other close region of Kyoto, it’s worth walking between sites. Trust me on this.

Nanzen-ji is up on a hill, a little bit like Kiyomizu-dera, but not as high up, and not nearly as crowded at 15:00 on a Tuesday afternoon. It’s also not nearly as kitchy, either. Nanzen-ji is one of those really really old places in Kyoto; it started life in 1264 as a detached palace for Kameyama and in 1291 became a Zen temple. Several smaller sub-temples and gardens have sprung up around the place; I stopped in to Konchi-in, founded by one of Nanzen-ji’s priests sometime during the 1400s. During the 17th century (roughly 1620 to about 1637 or so, from what I can tell), Kobori Enshu designed an eight-window tea room that is considered the best in Kyoto, and an absolutely goregous garden with a hugely evocative name (“Crane and Turtle”). There’s apparently a lot about these gardens that I don’t understand; the sign outside talks about the representative nature of various elements, and I suppose if you squint just right you could sort of see where Kobori was going (don’t hold your breath). They can, however, be appreciated on a purely abstract level regardless of your aesthetic sensibilities, and, indeed, you should see them for that reason. Anyway, the Crane and Turtle garden is a very nice place, with a couple of spots to sit down and rest.

As for the temple itself.. you have to lose your shoes at the entry way. Take a tip from me and don’t even try to put them on where you’ll have to walk on wood; you’ll get scolded. Nanzen-in is a middling garden off to the south of the main temple; I saw it for the sake of completeness, but thought Konchi-in was much nicer (not to mention larger). Not all parts of the temple are open on all days; today, when I visited, only the Abbot’s residence was open to the public (Y500 and this is where you lose your shoes). They do offer slippers, which, of course, didn’t fit my feet so the effect is less walking and more shuffling. As I said, Kyoto is an old, old city with old, old things in it, and you get a profound sense of history walking down darkened hallways, peering into rooms that look out onto gardens and the city below, and think about what it must have been like to live and work here.

I stopped for a breather and to let my shirt dry out a bit. Refreshed with a bottle of Pocari Sweat (seriously: Best. Drink. Name. Ever.), I walked back down the hill and popped in to Muran-an, one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-it places on the walk up towards Nanzen-ji. A hermitage built in 1894, the garden is (like the one at Heian-jingu) considered representative of gardens from the Meiji era. I’d call this a hidden jem; none of my guidebooks have anything to say about it though it is on one map.

Somewhere during this time my exposure compensation dial got set to +2. I remember thinking it was kind of strange to be working with ISO 800 film in shade, in the middle of the afternoon, and getting shutter/aperture combinations that looked an awful lot like 60/5.6 and — at one point — 20/3.5. WTF? I’m blaming the dehydration for my not having caught this sooner; I cringed when I caught this, having wondered exactly how long that much compensation had been dialed in (probably some time after Heian-jingu, since I remember deliberately underexposing a couple of frames of people walking across a wooden bridge for dramatic effect) and how many pictures might be wrecked as a result. (The answer, in case you’re curious, is probably going to turn out to be “between a handful and none” — having spent almost the entire day working with color negative film, which is extremely tolerant of over- and under-exposure, coupled with my lab, will be the things that save me.)

This problem fixed, I walked down to Shoren-in, my final stop for the day. I’d been on the go for six hours already and though I probably could have come back up this way on Thursday after presumably going back to Kiyomizu, (a) I didn’t know that for sure and (b) I’m not even certain I’ll make it back to Kiyomizu. Toyo seemed insistant that I go to Shoren-in if I wanted to see really good gardens, and I’m glad she did; I get the impression it’s a little off the beaten path, since most people in that area seem to head for Kodai-ji and Chion-in. Based on the near-total lack of English signage to explain anything, it would seem that it isn’t popular with the tourists. Which is fine with me. Shonen-in was originally the home of the chief Abbot of Tendai, back in 1895. Of course, looking at this now, I realize that I was five minutes from the aforementioned Chion-in, which is the home of my nominal school of Buddhism and so I probably should have kept going south. D’oh!

But that was enough. Seven hours of sightseeing, with what will probably work out to be about ten kilometers walked over the course of the day, is enough to tax anyone. I hopped a bus heading back to Kyoto station and nearly fell asleep on the ride. My shirt was soaked through and sweat-stained (thank god for black shirts, where it’s hard to tell). Showered, rinsed out the shirt, hung it up to dry, and.. went back out. I needed food and I had to visit the post office.

See, back on Sunday night, I managed to break one of my three pairs of pants. What happened was that I was in the bathroom, and I sat down, and something went “pop!” and the teeth of the zipper had pulled right out of the fabric. I was amazingly pissed about this, not only because these were $65 pants from MEC but also because they happened to be convertible pants that I was using as shorts to beat the unseasonable heat in Kyoto. Unwilling to abandon the pants in Japan over something so trivial, but equally unwilling to pack them around for the remainder of the trip (I really need the space), I elected instead to pack them up and send them home. Courier would have been nice, but FedEx wanted nearly $200 to send it back. So off to the post office I went, with a box, a long-sleeved t-shirt I never wear at home (never mind here), and a couple of pairs of socks I doubt I’ll need — things I can live with losing, but would rather not just throw out, if you know what I mean. They were accepted, and I waved bye-bye, wondering how long it would be before I would see them again (probably a month).

On the way to the Imperial Palace was today’s Humor Moment. At Gojo station a gaggle — and I really do mean a gaggle, since there were at least 30 of them — of Japanese schoolkids got on, lead by a very harried looking teacher with a megaphone (who looks kind of like my old dentist did when he was younger). I have no idea where they were going, but they couldn’t have been much more than about seven or eight, and rambunctious in the way seven or eight year-olds on a field trip are (the moreso when those seven or eight year-olds are traveling on public transportation). I was sitting in the corner of the car when they noticed me, and, no word of a lie, I must have been the most interesting thing they’d seen.. well, definitely all day, and judging by the amount of high-pitched chattering I’m guessing in a long, long time. It’s entirely possible I was the first foreigner they’d ever seen up close and personal, and within moments of their arrival in the car I was surrounded by ten of them, all jabbering at me in high-pitched Japanese.

One brave boy sat down next to me and began to speak slowly, the way I would imagine Japanese people talk to retarded kids. I managed to pick out him asking me, “Nihon-jin desu ka?” I shook my head. “Iie. Canada kara kimashita.” Well. If the sight of a gaijin sitting on a train was something remarkable, the prospect of one that might speak a little Japanese was enough to send these kids into paroxysms of delight. The tone and pitch and speed of the rapid-fire Japanese increased, and I was forced to dig through my memory to find Nihongo sukoshi dekimasu, which really only made it worse. One of them figured out that my hair was spiky, and that if they poked at it they’d find it was stiff, so they took turns poking at it (spiky hair apparently being unknown to Japanese schoolkids who are lacking in older siblings with bad habits to imitate). The advice I got from relatives back home was right — pretend like you don’t speak any Japanese at all, because otherwise be prepared for the firehose of comprehension. Hah! You have no idea!

The best part, though, was when I stood up to get off at my stop. “Sumimasen,” I said, slowly and clearly (this is, like, the most useful phrase for a tourist). I towered over them. The tallest kid came about 3/4 of the way up my leg. They stared up at me and then began to squeal with delight. My fan club realized what was happening, and began to wave; they seemed kind of disappointed. Their teacher caught me eye and smiled, mouthing, “Arigato gozaimasu“; this was the one time where do itashimashite is actually an appropriate response. There wasn’t much else I could have done; everyone is going to humor these kids, not kick them in the shins. Robert Young Pelton says you should travel in strange places with mementos from home to pass out to people, and a part of me really wishes I’d had something I could have passed out. Canadian flag stickers would have been awesome, but another part of me thinks that’s just condescending crap.

This underscores an interesting point that I thought about today. One of the reasons I’ve felt kind of isolated is because I don’t trust my Japanese skills enough to get around. Sure, I can buy things, and order food (if I have pictures to look at, or something to point to) and I even managed to mail a parcel this evening in pantomime. And I can ask for directions and even sort of understand the reply I get. But that’s about it. Without pictures, or a writing surface, I’m screwed. I get happy when I find things in English that I can understand (or Engrish, as the case may be, where I can guess). But then I think about Japanese tourists that come to Canada — they don’t expect us to be conversant in their language. I suppose they get a little thrill when they discover the desk staff at the Banff Springs speaks Japanese, or when they find a Japanese menu in the restaurant there, but it’s not expected. I’m not saying I expect it here, either, but eigo no menyu ga arimasu ka? sounds like a pleading. Tourists in Canada don’t go around asking everyone they meet “Excuse me, do you speak Japanese?”; I start most conversations that I expect to be complicated with the local equivalent of that phrase. The bus system has announcements in Japanese and English, at least for the important stops; you would never, in a thousand years, expect the same kind of thing to happen in a Canadian city. Even during the Olympics, I distinctly remember the only multilingual concession made by the city was to put “Olympic Plaza – Place Olympique” on the glass at that stop. The announcements weren’t even in French, or any other language for that matter. I can’t be the only person who thinks this is strange.

Yet I’m sure there’s more than a handful of tourists who come to Kyoto — as foreign-tourist friendly a city as you’re going to find in Japan — and who complains about the lack of English signage. Do the Japanese resent having to listen to announcements twice? Do restaurants resent having to print English menus? Do clerks resent being pestered to work in a language they’re not familiar with? I don’t know. I can’t tell. And it makes me a little uneasy.