WHEN our bullet train arrived in Kyoto, a scholarly, middle-aged woman was waiting for us at the platform.
Soft-spoken and proper, the Japanese woman was our guide for the day, the one we would vex with our witlessness and offend with our guilelessness.
Taking our group of six from the train station to our hotel, the Kyoto Royal Hotel and Spa, in taxis proved to be her first challenge. Acting so Third World, a member of our group had grabbed open the taxi’s left rear door, unknown to us an automatic door the driver was supposed to open and close for us remotely.
We later got to our first tourist spot—a Zen Buddhist temple—without incident.
Golden experience
Kyoto has thousands of Buddhist temples, Shinto shrines and other cultural assets because it was Japan’s capital for 1,000 years until 1868, when the capital was moved to Tokyo.
Among them is Kinkaku-ji (Temple of the Golden Pavilion), which started out as a villa of the 14th century Shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu, on whose death the garden complex was converted into a Zen Buddhist temple.
The shogun is the chief military commander or head of the samurai, the warrior class of early Japan that eventually became the ruling military class.
In Kinkaku-ji, the most prominent structure is Kinkaku (the Golden Pavilion), a three-story structure, the top two floors of which are covered in gold leaf. We would have been admiring a 700-year-old edifice had a mentally unstable novice monk not burned it down in 1950. The Pavilion was rebuilt in 1955.
Gold leaf is edible. And near the temple’s exit, we sampled the tea with gold leaf at a stall selling gold leaf as a powder.
Also near the exit, we dropped 100 yen (around P40) into fortune-telling machines that spit out slips of paper revealing how we would fare in love, business, travel and health. Asked whether these fortunes ever came true, our guide intoned, “It depends on your belief.”
Nightingale
We headed to Nijo Castle next, where we embarrassed our guide again by opening, this time, the right rear door of the taxi. It was not an automatic door. The issue was that it was on the traffic side of the street.
“It’s not safe,” she said, shaking her head as we continued pouring out of the taxi on the traffic side.
“But the taxi is parked well away from traffic,” we wanted to say. Heck, in the Philippines, we do this all the time. But then, this was Japan, where people followed rules, so we just seemed like a bad influence on the locals.
Nijo Castle was built in the 1600s as the Kyoto residence of the Tokugawa shoguns, who ruled from Tokyo even as Kyoto, where the emperor lived, remained the formal capital. The castle contains the Banshu (Guard Station), one of the offices used by the 100-strong samurai tasked to do patrols in the area.
More importantly, Nijo Castle contains the Ninomaru Palace with “nightingale floors” that emit bird sounds when stepped on, so no one could enter the palace undetected. The Palace also has reception rooms where a minister received gifts from visitors intended for the shogun and where samurai deposited their long swords to reduce the threat of assassination on the shogun.
The legal wife
Our guide said the shogun’s main castle in Tokyo was where his wife, mistress and 3,000 women lived. A shogun has an average of seven wives, she said, to ensure the birth of male heirs, as the shogun’s title, bestowed by the emperor, was hereditary.
“So who really ruled Japan?” we asked.
The shogun was the military and political leader, she said.
“So what was the emperor for?” we continued.
“Ceremonies!” she said, her head turning sharply, her voice rising.
Asked why the shogun did not just dispatch the emperor so he could consolidate power unto himself, she said this would court the ire of the public, who looked upon the emperor as the descendant of God or a deity; and invite other shoguns to replace the sitting shogun.
Shoguns eventually fell. And in the late 1800s, it was at Ninomaru Palace where the last shogun returned political power to the emperor.
Market
Leaving the palace, our guide deftly directed us next to the Nishiki market, where we could buy local street food like fish meat, octopus balls, seafood and vegetable tempura, and stop asking stupid questions that could rile Philippine-Japan relations.
But her ordeal was just beginning.
Geisha district
As sunset neared, we learned that geisha exist to this day, though what they were exactly was unclear to us even if we had watched the 2005 Steven Spielberg blockbuster Memoirs of a Geisha.
In Kyoto, geisha are called geiko. They are called maiko when they are still geisha in training as young as 15 years old. The Gion Geisha District, where there are traditional wooden houses and banquet halls, is where they live and work.
Outside a house run by a retired geiko, a board showed the schedule of classes for maiko and the teachers’ names. Geisha are trained in calligraphy, Japanese drum, guitar, song, dance, tea ceremony and flower arrangement.
When our guide said a geisha should retire after 27 years old, we just had to ask—and there was no delicate way to do it—whether the geisha did more than just sing, dance and talk to entertain men.
“Are they prostitutes?” we asked.
“No,” our guide, visibly offended, replied. But some men have fallen in love with geisha and made them their mistresses, she conceded.
She said women were not permitted to enter banquet halls where real geisha performed. In fact, not even just any man could enter such halls, as those who could enter belonged to a very “prestigious and exclusive club—like the clubs in England.”
Asked what the requirements were for joining this club, and whether annual fees were involved, our guide gasped and replied curtly that eligibility for membership rested on “mental” and “spiritual” credentials. She said no man may enter a banquet hall if he was not brought there or introduced to the club by someone who was already a club member.
We did not attempt to enter any banquet hall. No problem. Many of the houses in Gion have already been converted into restaurants that tourists may freely enter.
The next day, a different guide showed up, and we were more sedate in our questioning.
Gifts of nature
Nature is central to Kyoto’s attractions, and the tourist who goes to Kyoto in late November without visiting Nanjenzi-Eikando, a garden with 3,000 maple trees, will regret it. We had already seen gardens in other parts of Japan. But autumn in Kyoto takes the cake.
There are 50 types of maple trees in Nanjenzi-Eikando, and they were breathtaking in yellow, orange and red in November’s autumn. Even in the rain, they were stunning. Even if you don’t like trees, you will appreciate this exquisite gift of nature.
In Kyoto’s Arashiyama district stands another testament to the splendor of nature, the 16-hectare Bamboo Forest, where tall bamboo stalks seeming to touch the sky sway gracefully in languid cadence. The tourists trudging up the trail through the stalks were myriad. But the walk was silent, respectful of the creator of this beautiful nature show.
If you don’t like giving your cardiovascular system a workout, young Japanese men can take you on a rickshaw ride through the forest. Toned and all, the men are lookers and may set hearts aflutter, giving matrons the cardiovascular exercise they need, without the walking.
Gateways
No trip to Kyoto is complete without a visit to the Fushimi Inari Shrine dedicated to Inari, the god of rice. The shrine is famed for its thousands of Torii (decorative gateways) donated by Japan businessmen seeking good fortune in their business.
The Torii, which go all the way up to the Inari mountain, vary in size, depending on whether the company coughed up just 175,000 yen (P70,000) or more than one million yen (P400,000) for its Torii, on whose pillars the company’s name and date of donation are prominently displayed.
A thousand years, a thousand gateways. For a thousand reasons, Kyoto is a window into Japan’s ageless civilization.