SEARCHING FOR THE HEART OF OLD JAPAN

“Slow down and look closely.”

This is the one piece of advice my sister, who once lived in Japan, gave me before I visited Kyoto last fall. At first I thought I understood, but it would take me more than a week in the city, which lies about 250 miles west of Tokyo, to put her wise counsel to use. The potter Kanjiro Kawai, who is credited with starting the Japanese folk arts revival in the 1920s, wrote: “What a wonderful Now! It is surely eternity.” That is the Zen-like idea my sister had in mind, and what I had to learn.

Laid out in a perfect grid in the manner of the Chinese city Xian, Kyoto became the capital of Japan in 794. It held onto that title for 1,000 formative years, reaching its artistic and cultural zenith from about 800 to 1200, despite periods of devastating civil war when rival camps made the city “an empty field from which the evening skylark rises with song and descends among tears” (to borrow the words of a 16th century official). The great Tenmai fire in 1854 destroyed 80% of the city, including the imperial palace. Fourteen years later the nobleman Ieyasu Tokugawa wrested power from the emperor and abandoned Kyoto altogether, moving the seat of government to the place we now call Tokyo.

When we visit Kyoto today we see a city largely no more than 150 years old, with 1,500 lovingly restored temples and shrines, 20% of the country’s “national treasures” (from No theater stages to painted screens), narrow wooden row houses known as machinami, a geisha quarter, workshops preserving such traditional arts and crafts as fan-making and scroll-mounting, and small specialty stores.

I’d been to Kyoto 25 years ago, when I was too young to fully appreciate its complicated charm but old enough to feel terribly foreign. On my return recently, what struck me most was how the city has grown into a modern sprawl. What also struck me was how prosperous and Western the people look.

Kyoto seemed less Japanese than I remembered. No one tried to practice English with me as they had so often done on my first visit. Junky tourist shops and concrete apartment houses have elbowed out most of the city’s precious machinami, leaving only a few atmospheric neighborhoods. For this reason, many purists now think of Kyoto not as the quietly beating heart of old Japan, but as a tourist-clogged museum in the style of colonial Williamsburg.

I wouldn’t go that far. But I must say that those who visit the city seeking a perfect Japanese frame for art appreciation and contemplation will be shocked. This is especially true in the downtown, with its high-rises, frenzied office workers, garish 430-foot tower (built under protest in 1964) and cavernous new glass-plated train station (with a luxury hotel, theater and department store) that looks like something out of “Star Wars.”

Still, for travelers, development has its compensations: the ease and efficiency of getting around. I flew into Kansai Airport, built in 1994 on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, walked to the train station across the terminal and bought a ticket from a vending machine for the Japan Rail express to Kyoto. When the train pulled in, a squadron of cleaners went to work, finishing just as the seats rotated automatically so that passengers could face front during the 75-minute return trip to Kyoto. If all that weren’t enough, the cleaners stood by the train when it left, smiling and waving goodbye.

This kind of service and attention to detail impressed me everywhere I went. The first hotel I stayed in had heated toilet seats; washing machines in the coin laundries dispensed detergent automatically; at almost every corner there were fully stocked vending machines selling water, soda, coffee and beer.

The streets were spotless, and so safe that I never felt inclined to look over my shoulder, even at night. Nor did I have any trouble mastering the subway or bus systems, with the help of a map I picked up at the tourist office downtown. When I wearied, it seemed as if there was always an empty taxicab passing by, with lace seat covers and white-gloved drivers who routinely refused tips.

I was also lucky to have landed in Japan when the yen was at a relative low point compared to the dollar. In 1995, $1 was worth about 80 yen; on my early October visit, I got 135 yen per dollar.

I just read Arthur Golden’s “Memoirs of a Geisha,” which chronicles the life of a fictional orphan who arrives in Kyoto in the early 1900s and grows up to become a famous geisha called Sayuri. “When spring came,” she says in the novel, “the cherry trees blossomed in Maruyama Park, and no one in Kyoto seemed to talk about anything else.” The spring cherry blossom and fall foliage seasons routinely draw millions to the city, as shrines and temples normally closed to the public briefly open their doors for viewing. But I arrived too early to see the red maples peak. Mist veiled the mountains and every day it poured, turning the streets into a garden of gaily colored umbrellas.

I took my time getting reaccustomed to the Japanese way of life, starting out near the train station in a Western-style room (for a special promotional rate of $90) at the 500-room Rihga Royal, an unappealing concrete block of a hotel much nicer inside than it looks from the street. My room had two single beds, a tiny bath and a sitting area facing a picture window--all as spotlessly clean as a hospital. But there were Japanese touches such as Shiseido toiletries, shoji screens and “The Teachings of Buddha” on the bedside table. One day I saw a Buddhist monk checking in; men dined in hotel restaurants wearing slippers; and while I swam laps in the indoor pool, an attendant took the water temperature with great deliberation. I went running in nearby Umekoji Park or the Shimabara district just west, a quiet residential backwater dotted with a few venerable machinami, nicknamed “eels’ nests” because of their long, narrow configuration. Shimabara was once a licensed pleasure quarter, moated and gated, which is why so many prostitutes died there during the 1854 fire.

The restaurants in the hotel all seemed frightfully dear. So I saved money by frequenting workers’ eateries, as well as a pretty lunch spot called Un in Umekoji Park, overlooking Midori no Yakata garden, built in 1994 to commemorate Kyoto’s 1,200th anniversary. (A fixed-price lunch of sushi, udon noodles and tea cost $7.50.)

Sterile though downtown Kyoto may seem, the area still has its beguilements, chiefly Higashi and Nishi Hongan-ji, two huge temples (ji means temple in Japanese) that are the centers for rival sects of Jodo Shin-shu Buddhism, which started in the 13th century. Nishi Hongan-ji to the west is the better preserved, with a graceful cedar-roofed shoin, or temple headquarters, built during the opulent Momoyama period in the 16th century. The treasures there include Japan’s oldest No stage (built in 1581), an exquisite series of wisteria paintings and a lush garden recalling the ones I’ve seen in the garden city of Suzhou, China.

Nevertheless, I was happy when it came time to move to the little Three Sisters Inn Annex, in a workaday neighborhood 15 minutes by cab northeast of downtown. The annex, two blocks south of the inn’s main building, occupies a single-story structure tucked behind Heian Shrine, a 19th century replica of Kyoto’s old imperial palace. My room (priced at $80 a night) was modest but comfortable, this time Japanese style with sliding doors opening onto a pocket garden, tatami mats covering the floor and just a few Western touches, such as a table and chairs, TV and private bath.

But I seldom used the tub, opting instead to visit the neighborhood baths on my way home from dinner (with separate facilities for men and women). There I learned how to get really clean by watching an elderly woman seated on the tile spend 30 minutes sudsing, scrubbing and rinsing every part of her body before finally lowering herself into a tub of water so hot it made the skin pinken. After my bath, how I loved walking back to the inn in the drizzling rain, then crawling between the soft white sheets of my futon.

Most of the finest temples, shrines, parks and gardens cling to the wooded slopes that edge the city, making the inn’s location perfect for walking between sights on Kyoto’s east side: Maruyama Park, Kiyomizu Temple (reached by a winding lane lined with ceramics shops), the Silver Pavilion (or Ginkaku Temple), Yasaka Shrine, the Kyoto Handicraft Center and the old Gion geisha district.

I could never do justice to all of them. So I will only mention those that made a lingering impression, such as secluded Shoren-in Temple, with five great, gnarly camphor trees at the entrance. Built during the Muromachi period (1338-1573), it is by tradition an imperial temple (an uncle of the present emperor, Akihito, serves as abbot).

While I was there, rain pelted the Pond of the Dragon’s Heart by the teahouse, and it seemed as if the mountain that looms behind Shoren-in was actually part of the garden (perfectly demonstrating the Japanese gardening concept of “borrowed scenery”). That green memory remains inseparable in my mind from the endless sound of Shoren-in’s gong and my first taste of iced green tea, taken at a sweet shop around the corner.

On other days, I walked the canal-side Philosopher’s Path leading north to Ginkaku-ji, and visited the great temple compound of Nanzen-ji, standing in quasi-comprehension before the Leaping Tiger Garden, a raked sand and rock Zen classic thought to be the work of the great Kobori Enshu. Across the lane that borders the north side of Nanzen-ji, there’s a stream-side vegetarian restaurant called Koan, where every course in the $23 fixed-price lunch I ordered featured tofu: in soup, barbecued with green sauce, boiled with onions and fried, tempura style.

Sometimes I ventured farther afield, touring the Imperial Palace, the centerpiece of Kyoto Imperial Palace Park, with hardy schoolchildren jogging around its walls and six gates. And I took a little commuter train north to the mountain villages of Kurama and Kibune. They are connected by footpath, which means you can alight in Kibune, hike three miles to Kurama, take a dip in the hot springs there, catch the train at Kurama Station and ride back to Kyoto clean.

Truly, though, there was no need to go anywhere once I checked into Hiiragiya Bekkan, the less expensive annex of one of the finest traditional inns, or ryokans, in Kyoto. My room there cost about $135 a night (half the price of a standard double at the main inn, two blocks south). But that price included a Japanese-style breakfast as well as dinner, and the undivided attention of a serving woman in kimono.

She brought me green tea and a sugary bean-curd pastry when I arrived, took me to the bath down the hall, laid out my futon and served me dinner in the elaborate, eye-engaging style of Kyoto cuisine--10 little courses, artfully presented, starting with a marinated fish salad, sashimi and dumpling soup, ending with brightly colored Japanese pickles, miso, tea and sorbet. The meal climaxed around course five, a dish of grilled whitefish. Centered on a senescent brown leaf, the fish was covered in orange squash sauce and had two green beans and a scattering of walnuts as the final, autumnal touches. “It is said of Japanese cuisine that it is a cuisine to be looked at rather than eaten,” wrote the Japanese novelist Junichiro Tanizaki. “I would go further and say that it is to be meditated upon.”

I tried to meditate at the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji) and at the fabled Zen rock garden at Ryoan Temple on the west side of town. But there were too many other pilgrims at Kinkaku, and an abrasive taped explanatory lecture broke the stillness at Ryoan-ji, making it hard to contemplate the sound of one hand clapping. In order to find traditional Japan, uncorrupted, I had to tour the soulfully decorated home of Kanjiro Kawai southeast of downtown and take the train to Katsura Imperial Villa, built in 1624, west of the city center on the idling Katsura River. With great joy, I found the villa an inviolate island of mossy green, unchanged since my visit many years before. Dreaming eyes see the lake in the garden as a sea, the rounded rocks at its edge as a beach.

“Though in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto,” the poet Basho wrote. Maybe I will never understand the city, unfathomable by any measure. And maybe modernization has spoiled Kyoto for devotees. But to me it seemed an accomplishment to note that by looking closely, I could still see things Japanese.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

GUIDEBOOK

Old World Kyoto

Getting there: JAL, Northwest, United and Thai Airways offer nonstop flights between Los Angeles and Osaka, the most convenient city to Kyoto. American has connecting service. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $830.

Many trains make the trip between Osaka’s Kansai International Airport and Kyoto (one-way express fare is about $26). There are buses as well, costing about $17 one way.

Where to stay: Rooms at the Rihga Royal Hotel, telephone 011-81-75-341-1121, fax 011-81-75-341-3073, range from $90 to $150 (higher for suites). Three Sisters Inn Annex, tel. 011-81-75-761-6333, fax 011-81-75-761-6335, has rooms for about $80 to $180; continental breakfasts are about $5. The Hiiragiya Bekkan, tel. 011-81-75-231-0151, fax 011-81-75-231-0153, has rooms for about $135, including breakfast, dinner; rates in the inn’s main building start at $300.

Another excellent Japanese-style option that I inspected is the Yachiyo Inn, tel. 011-81-75-771-4148, in a good location near Nanzen Temple; rates about $150 to $600 (includes two meals). More accommodations are contained in booklets such as “Hotels in Japan” and “Japan Ryokan Guide”; contact the Japanese tourist office in L.A. (see below). Visiting imperial palaces/villas: Apply in person at the Imperial Household Agency in Kyoto Imperial Palace Park; bring your passport. Tickets are free; local tel. 211-1215. For more information: Japan National Tourist Organization, 515 S. Figueroa St., L.A. 90071; tel. (213) 623-1952, fax (213) 623-6301.