More Kyoto and then back to Tokyo

After my tour ended, I got to spend two more days in Kyoto seeing a few more of the hundreds of shrines and temples.  Even more amazing.

According to our guide, the US did not bomb Kyoto conventionally (missiles and fire bombs) because they planned on dropping the atomic bomb here and they wanted a "pure" comparison of the damage done by various types of bombs.  But then someone figured out how important Kyoto is culturally to Japan and realized that if we bombed Kyoto, the Japanese would never forgive us.  So Kyoto escaped any bombing.  

We walked through narrow streets with original wood houses although the guide did say that they are losing two or three original houses a week and rebuilding with cheaper, modern materials.  The rounded section (inuyarai) at the bottom of the house, which is traditionally made of wood, is to protect the wooden walls from animals, specifically ... dog pee which rots the wood.  A lot of the wooden walls look burned because they are.  They are lightly scorched to dry out the wood and apparently, protect the walls for larger fires.

We took an evening walking tour of Gion which is traditionally the Geisha district, although in Kyoto, geishas are called geikos.  Each serves a one year apprenticeship as a maiko, essentially working as a servant.  If she makes it through that year, she continues as a trainee for five years, learning dance, music, and culture.  Our guide pointed out the signs and letters that were discreetly placed on buildings to designate Geisha houses, tea houses, and sake houses. We finished our tour at the lovely Yasaka Shrine.

The next day Kasey and I took a five hour e-bike tour of Kyoto where we got to really explore a much bigger section of the old parts of the city.  One comment about local guides:  on my tour of the fish market in Tokyo two weeks ago, my guide was an Israeli from a Russian family who made multiple trips to Japan and fell in love with it, so he moved here permanently a few years ago.  The guide from our evening walking tour of Gion was from Spain, and the bike tour guide, who is from London, moved here more than twenty five years ago.  And the best guide I would have (two days later) was from Ecuador.  I have two questions:  first, what makes these young people fall in love with Japan, a country that is so different and has a difficult language to learn?  Second, given what I have read about how unaccepting the Japanese are of foreigners, do they ever really "become" Japanese?  Is tour guiding the only work they can do here?  I wonder.

Back to our bike ride.  Kyoto has several canals and we rode along lovely trails, including the Philosopher's Path.  Kyoto is a university town, with students comprising one tenth the population.  At one point we walked (not rode) across the narrowest bridge in Kyoto.  It was a beautiful fall day with leaves changing colors, something I don't get to see in California.  And the tour ended with a fifteen minutes ride on the American River Bike Trail - whoops, it was the Kamo River Bike Trail - but I felt right at home passing white egrets and duck families.  Another Buddhist temple, the Nanzenji, has of all things ... a Roman aqueduct.  Okay, the Romans never got to Japan, but the Japanese definitely copied it.

Another beautiful Shinto shrine, the Heian, and then the highlight of the ride, the Imperial Palace and Garden.  The emperors may not have had much power - that rested in the Shogunate - but they were big on ceremony, and this was the home and ceremonial seat of the emperor from the eighth to the nineteenth century when the capital moved to Tokyo.

Lunch was another experience with too much food but it was our own fault.  We went to a sushi restaurant with a conveyor belt.  Not the kind that circulates pre-made, mediocre sushi endlessly.  Rather, this was a completely automatic experience.  At the entrance to the restaurant was a screen where we entered the number of people and it gave us a ticket with our table number so we could seat ourselves.  At the table was a screen that scrolled through pictures of the entire menu.  We clicked on whatever we wanted, and that dish appeared two minutes later, diverted from the main conveyor belt to a spur line to our table.  Just before it arrived, the screen announced:  your item(s) are about to arrive.  I was so intrigued by the process and the range of sushi that I kept ordering, eventually trying egg salad sushi and salted pork rib sushi (looked more like bacon).  We did not try the minihamburger sushi, salmon basil mozzarella sushi, or eggplant wasabi sushi.  When we finished eating, we took the slip we had been given on entering to the payment machine, and presto, there was the bill which, of course, we paid with a credit card.

Egg salad sushi

Salted pork rib sushi

The next day, Kasey and I took the bullet train to Tokyo.  Our first stop was back to the fish market.  It was already after 2:00 when we got there so a lot of stalls were closing down.  The fish market is definitely an early morning place.  But I did finally get (in the fish market, of course) ... my first waygu beef.  It was delicious.  Topped off with grilled and flamed scallops.

We took two night walking tour in different Tokyo neighborhoods:  a beautifully lit up stroll through Asakusa and the next night we joined the masses in Shinjuku, the entertainment district of Tokyo.  A bit overwhelming and not our kind of entertainment.  In the daytime, we took a long bike ride through a much quieter section of Tokyo stopping, of course, at a Shinto shrine and Buddhist temple or two, as well as riding around the Imperial Palace and Gardens.  The ride took us through narrow alleys and neighborhoods that we could not have seen any other way.  As a pedestrian, I was a bit mystified at the no jaywalking culture.  Even at a small street with nothing coming at 10:00 at night, if the walk sign is red, no one crosses.  That is not how I learned to cross streets in New York.  But as a biker, I loved it.  If I had a green, no one was going to walk in front of me or turn right on red.  I started to relax even at blind intersections, and there were a lot of them since the streets are so narrow with buildings right up to the sidewalk.  Even riding on the left in narrow bike lanes was not nearly as intimidating as I expected.

Godzilla in Shinjuku

One last walking tour on my last night alone in Tokyo after Kasey left.  No, I did not transport magically to Paris,  I had an excellent tour of the Tokyo Tower with the best guide I have had in Japan.  Ethan is from Ecuador and that is his real name although his mother speaks only Spanish and there is no "th" sound in Spanish (except for the lispy Castillians).  His mother watched and loved Mission Impossible and took Ethan's name from the movie.  He has lived in Japan for ten years and even attended university here.  He insisted that the Tokyo Tower is not a copy of the Eiffel Tower; rather, this is the best way to build a tower structurally.

And finally, one of the weirdest things I have seen in Japan ... kids playing pickleball on one of the levels of the Tokyo Tower.