Kyoto京都

In 794 Emperor Kanmu moved his court from Nagaoka-kyō, abandoned after only ten years, to a basin ringed by hills on three sides and drained by the Kamo and Katsura rivers. The new capital, Heian-kyō (平安京, ‘capital of peace and tranquillity’), copied the Chinese model of Chang’an at about a third of the size: a rectangle roughly 4.5 km east to west and 5.2 km north to south, with the palace at the top and an avenue about 85 m wide, Suzaku-ōji, running south to the Rashōmon gate. Only two Buddhist temples were allowed inside the walls, Tō-ji and Sai-ji, both by the southern gate. Tō-ji is still there; Sai-ji is a small park.

The plan never filled out as drawn. The western half, Ukyō, sat on wet, low ground and emptied over the following centuries, while the eastern half, Sakyō, grew past its boundary towards the Kamo river and the Higashiyama hills. That lopsidedness is why the historic centre today sits east of the old central axis, and why the modern Imperial Palace, rebuilt in 1855 on a site the court used from the 14th century, is not where the Heian palace stood. The original palace ground lies under ordinary streets west of Nijō Castle, marked only by stone posts.

The Ōnin War of 1467–1477, a succession quarrel inside the Ashikaga shogunate, was fought largely in the streets of the capital. The two armies camped in the city for a decade and burned most of it, including the majority of the temples a visitor now tours. Very little wooden architecture in Kyoto predates this war; most famous halls are 17th-century rebuildings. The western army’s camp gave its name to Nishijin, ‘western camp’, which became the weaving district once the fighting stopped.

Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who unified the country in the 1580s, redrew the city. He cut new north–south lanes through the square Heian blocks, making the long, narrow plots that shaped the townhouse. In 1591 he ringed the town with an earthen rampart, the Odoi, of which fragments survive near Kitano Tenmangū, and he herded temples into a single strip on the eastern edge, still called Teramachi (‘temple town’). Under the Tokugawa shoguns, who governed from Edo after 1603, Kyoto stayed the seat of the emperor and the country’s centre of crafts, printing and fine goods.

When the emperor left for Tokyo in 1869 the population fell sharply, and the city answered with engineering. The Lake Biwa Canal, opened in 1890, brought water and then hydroelectric power across the eastern hills; the brick aqueduct inside Nanzen-ji is part of it. Japan’s first commercial electric tram ran here in 1895. In 1945 Kyoto escaped the air raids that levelled most Japanese cities, reportedly after the US Secretary of War, Henry Stimson, struck it from the atomic-bomb target list. In 1994 seventeen sites in and around the city were inscribed together by UNESCO as the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto.

Gion began as the approach to Yasaka Shrine, known until 1868 as Gion-sha, and grew rich serving the pilgrims who walked to it. Teahouses licensed for entertaining became the ochaya, where geiko (Kyoto’s word for geisha) and apprentice maiko still work by appointment. Most ochaya accept guests only on introduction from an existing client, a custom called ichigen-san okotowari. Hanamikōji, the street south of Shijō, is lined with them; the stone-paved Shirakawa canal and Tatsumi Bridge to the north are older in feel and quieter in the morning.

Kyoto has five kagai, licensed entertainment districts: Gion Kōbu, Gion Higashi, Miyagawa-chō, Pontochō and Kamishichiken. Pontochō is a single lane, barely wide enough for two people, between the Kamo river and the Takase canal. It filled with inns and teahouses in the 17th century after the riverbank was built up. From May to September its restaurants put out raised wooden decks over the water, the noryō-yuka, and the lanterns of the Pontochō ochaya carry a plover (chidori) crest.

Nishijin, north-west of the palace, has woven silk for obi and kimono since the late 15th century. The district is a warren of narrow houses where looms once sat on beaten-earth floors, and in quiet streets you can still hear the clack of a jacquard loom through a lattice. Kamishichiken, the oldest of the kagai, grew up alongside it near Kitano Tenmangū, entertaining the weavers and merchants. Both are good examples of how Kyoto’s crafts were organised by street.

Where the Kamo and Takano rivers meet at Demachiyanagi, a triangle of land called the Kamo Delta has stepping stones shaped like turtles and plovers, used by students from nearby Kyoto University. South of the centre, Fushimi was a separate river port and castle town, linked to Osaka by boats on the Uji river. Its groundwater fed the sake breweries that still line its canals, and the Teradaya inn there is associated with Sakamoto Ryōma, a key figure in the 1860s turn against the shogunate.

The kyō-machiya, the wooden townhouse, is the building type that best explains the old city. Taxes were once levied on street frontage, so plots were narrow, typically 5–6 m wide, and deep, up to 20 m or more; locals call the shape unagi no nedoko, ‘an eel’s bed’. A beaten-earth passage (tōri-niwa) runs from the street to the back, with the kitchen along it under a high, smoke-blackened void. A small courtyard garden, the tsubo-niwa, brings light and air to the middle of the house.

The street face carries the most information. Wooden lattices (kōshi) differ by trade, with finer slats once marking textile or rice dealers. The low, clay-rendered upper floor has slit windows called mushiko-mado, ‘insect-cage windows’. Curved bamboo fences at the foot of the wall, inuyarai, keep dogs, carts and splashing rain off the plaster. Look up at the eaves for a small clay figure of Shōki, a demon-queller, set there to deflect bad luck reflected from a temple roof opposite. Surveys show the city lost more than 13 per cent of its machiya between 1993 and 2003, and demolitions continue.

Temples and shrines follow different grammars. A Buddhist temple has a gate, halls on stone platforms, tiled or bark roofs and often a pagoda; Zen compounds such as Kennin-ji lay their main buildings along a straight axis. A Shinto shrine is marked by torii gates, a purification basin (temizuya) and bright vermilion paint in the Inari and Yasaka traditions. Many roofs you see are of hinoki cypress bark laid in thin layers (hiwadabuki), which needs replacing every few decades and is why scaffolding is a normal sight.

Modern Kyoto has argued about height for decades. Kyoto Tower (1964) and the steel-and-glass Kyoto Station building by Hara Hiroshi (1997) both drew protests. In 2007 the city passed a landscape ordinance that lowered height limits across much of the centre, restricted rooftop signs and protected sightlines to the hills and to the bonfire characters lit each August. That rule is why chain stores in Gion and Higashiyama use muted brown or white logos.

Kyoto is far from the sea, so its cooking developed around water, vegetables, soy and preserved fish. The city’s soft groundwater draws flavour gently from kombu kelp, giving a pale dashi that other regions find thin and locals find clean. Light-coloured usukuchi soy sauce is used so that food keeps its colour. The same soft water feeds Fushimi’s sake breweries and the tofu makers whose yudōfu, tofu simmered in kombu broth, is served around Nanzen-ji.

Several cuisines overlap. Yūsoku ryōri was the ceremonial food of the court. Shōjin ryōri, vegetarian temple cooking, came with Zen monasteries and relies on tofu, yuba (the skin lifted from heated soy milk) and wheat gluten. Kaiseki grew out of the light meal served before a tea ceremony and became today’s seasonal multi-course dinner. Obanzai is the everyday home cooking of Kyoto families: simmered vegetables, dried fish and pulses, now sold by the bowl in small counters.

Fresh sea fish was scarce, so preserved fish shaped the menu. Salted mackerel was carried roughly 70 km from Wakasa Bay along the route now called the Saba Kaidō, and by the time it arrived it was ready for sabazushi, pressed mackerel sushi. Hamo, pike conger, survives the journey alive and is so closely tied to July that Gion Matsuri is sometimes called the hamo festival. Its many small bones are traditionally cut by hand about 24 times for every 3 cm of flesh.

Kyō-yasai, the heirloom vegetables of the Kyoto basin, carry place names: Kamo aubergine, Kujō spring onion, Shōgoin turnip, Horikawa burdock. Pickles are their other life. Senmaizuke are thin slices of Shōgoin turnip in vinegar and kombu, shibazuke are aubergine and red shiso from Ōhara, and suguki is a sour turnip pickle from Kamigamo. Nishiki Market, a covered lane of about 130 stalls, began as a fish market because cold wellwater here kept stock fresh, and it is still where to see these ingredients side by side.

Three festivals are called the great ones. The Aoi Matsuri on 15 May is the oldest, a court procession in Heian dress from the Imperial Palace to Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines, with hollyhock (aoi) leaves pinned to everything. Gion Matsuri runs all of July. The Jidai Matsuri on 22 October is the newest, begun in 1895 for the 1,100th anniversary of the capital; its procession walks backwards through history, costumed period by period, to Heian Shrine.

Gion Matsuri began in 869 as a rite to calm the spirits blamed for an epidemic, with 66 halberds set up for the provinces of Japan. Its centrepiece is the yamaboko, floats owned by individual downtown neighbourhoods. The big hoko weigh around 12 tonnes and stand over 20 m to the tip of their spears; they have wooden wheels and no steering, so at corners crews turn them on wet bamboo slats in a manoeuvre called tsuji-mawashi. Processions run on 17 and 24 July, and some float tapestries were woven in Flanders or Persia centuries ago.

On the three evenings before each procession, the yoiyama nights, streets close to traffic and the floats are lit and open to view. Old merchant families open their front rooms to show screens and heirlooms, a custom called the Byōbu Matsuri. The festival stopped for more than 30 years after the Ōnin War and was revived by the townspeople, which is why float ownership stayed with neighbourhoods rather than the shrine. UNESCO listed the procession in 2009.

On 16 August the Gozan Okuribi lights five bonfire characters on the surrounding hills to send ancestral spirits back after Obon, starting with 大 on Nyoigatake at 20:00. Smaller dates fill the calendar: Setsubun in early February at Yoshida Shrine and Mibu-dera, the Miyako Odori dances by Gion Kōbu geiko in April, and the Kurama fire festival on the night of 22 October. On the 21st of each month a flea market fills Tō-ji (Kōbō-san), and on the 25th another fills Kitano Tenmangū (Tenjin-san).

About 1.4 million people live in Kyoto, and a large share of them are students: the city has dozens of universities, led by Kyoto University (1897) and Dōshisha. It is also a manufacturing town with an unusual list of headquarters, including Nintendo, Kyocera, Shimadzu and Murata, several of which grew from old craft or instrument businesses. Much of daily life happens by bicycle on the flat grid, and on warm evenings couples space themselves along the Kamo riverbank at almost regular intervals.

Addresses follow the grid rather than house numbers. A location is given as the nearest intersection plus a direction: agaru (north), sagaru (south), higashi-iru (east) or nishi-iru (west). East–west streets were once numbered from Ichijō (First Avenue) to Kujō (Ninth Avenue), and a children’s counting song is still used to remember their order. Knowing the suffixes makes a Kyoto business card readable and explains why taxi drivers ask for the crossing, not the street number.

The local dialect, Kyō-kotoba, is softer than Osaka speech; ‘ōkini’ for thank you and ‘oideyasu’ for welcome are the phrases visitors hear most. Kyoto people have a reputation, which they joke about themselves, for indirect speech. The stock example is being offered bubuzuke, rice with tea poured over, as a hint that it is time to leave. The practical lesson for visitors is that a mild ‘that may be difficult’ usually means no.

Tourism is now a civic issue. Residents of Gion have put up signs on private lanes that ban photography, the city runs separate sightseeing buses to relieve crowding on regular routes, and the lodging tax was raised. More than 100 public bathhouses (sentō) survive, many in old buildings; Funaoka Onsen in the north-west is the best known. A neighbourhood bath, a monthly market or a riverside evening shows the city on its own terms.