Kyoto: Temples, Ten Thousand Gates, and a Near-Miss at Osaka Airport

The deer in Nara have worked something out. They figured it generations ago, probably, that the humans arriving in busloads and spilling through the park gates are carrying food, and that the humans, once presented with a deer at close range, are incapable of refusing. So the deer of Nara do not flee. They approach. They follow. They will, if given an opportunity, insert their nose into your bag with the calm efficiency of someone who has done this ten thousand times and expects it to work, because it always does.

I bought a packet of deer treats from a vendor near the park entrance, which in retrospect was unnecessary. The deer had already identified me as a soft touch before I’d opened the packet. Within about thirty seconds I had four of them arranged around me in a rough semicircle, and within a minute I was jogging away from them through a crowd of Japanese schoolchildren who found this considerably funnier than I did.

Nara was a day trip from Kyoto, taken with Duncan, a quietly sardonic Scotsman from a fishing town on the west coast whose name I kept forgetting to write down, and Sarah from Adelaide, who approached every situation with a practicality that made her an excellent travelling companion. We’d met at the hostel the previous evening after I’d spent an embarrassing amount of time in an electronics store called Yodobashi, which occupies several floors near Kyoto station and which I would genuinely recommend to anyone visiting the city who wants to understand something about the relationship between Japanese consumer culture and the concept of excess. The camera floor alone contained more cameras than I believed it was possible to manufacture. The headphone section was the size of a small field. You could play with everything, nothing was locked to the shelf, and no one approached to ask if you needed help, which made it the platonic ideal of a shop as far as I’m concerned. I spent roughly three hours in there and left without buying anything, which felt like a moral victory of some kind.

710

Nara was Japan's capital from 710 to 784, a brief run for a national capital but long enough to produce infrastructure on a considerable scale.

Nara was Japan’s capital from 710 to 784, a brief run for a national capital but long enough to produce infrastructure on a considerable scale. The city’s most significant building is Todai-ji, the temple complex that houses the largest bronze Buddha in the world, a seated figure fifteen metres high that sits inside what was, for a long time, the largest wooden building on earth. The building has been rebuilt twice since the original construction, and each rebuild produced something slightly smaller than its predecessor, meaning the current structure, though enormous, is only about two-thirds the size of the original. The statue inside it is the original. It has not shrunk.

Standing in front of a fifteen-metre Buddha in a wooden building that has been standing, in various iterations, for thirteen centuries does something to your sense of scale. The courtyard was quieter than I expected. Most of the other visitors were Japanese, which felt right for a place of this age and significance, and the whole arrangement had the quality of somewhere that had been thoroughly absorbed into the life of the city rather than preserved apart from it. We ate lunch at a small restaurant nearby, sitting at low traditional tables on the floor, the experience considerably more charming in retrospect than it was at the time, since low tables and long legs are not a natural combination.

The afternoon took us to Fushimi Inari, the shrine complex south of Kyoto city famous for its thousands of vermilion torii gates climbing the hillside in near-continuous chains. Each gate was donated by a Japanese business, the name of the donor painted in black characters on the back pillar, the custom dating back centuries as a form of prayer to Inari, the god of industry and success. There are said to be ten thousand gates in total, forming tunnels of red that stretch for four kilometres up and through the forested hill. Walking through them at dusk, with the light filtering through the gaps between the structures and the bamboo pressing in on both sides, produces a particular kind of stillness that is very difficult to explain and very easy to feel.

On the train back through the city, a group of schoolchildren ran into our carriage, sat down opposite us, spent the entire journey whispering to each other about something that appeared to be us, and then at the next stop said, carefully and collectively, “see you later,” and bolted off the train in what I can only describe as a controlled explosion of excitement. We waved after them. They went completely wild. It was one of the best things that happened on the entire Japan leg of the trip.

The following morning I had to catch a flight from Osaka airport to Hong Kong. I had planned the train connections from Kyoto to Osaka city to Osaka airport the previous afternoon, working through the timetables with what I believed to be appropriate care. I had, in the planning, made a single catastrophic assumption: that the train from Osaka city to its international airport would take about ten minutes, which is roughly how long it takes in most cities of comparable size. Osaka airport is not ten minutes from the city. It is an hour away, on a different island, connected by a train that is not the train I had planned to take.

I ran through Osaka airport with a backpack that felt significantly heavier than fourteen kilograms, was met at the gate by a woman who took one look at me and made a decision, and was escorted through staff passport control, staff customs, and onto the automatic shuttle to the gate with a speed that suggested she had performed this particular rescue operation before. The flight was boarding. I got on it. I do not recommend this as a travel strategy but I can confirm it works.

Most of the other visitors were Japanese, which felt right for a place of this age and significance, and the whole arrangement had the quality...

Landing in Hong Kong, I turned on my phone and discovered that Japan had been hit by an earthquake with a magnitude of 9.0. The forty emails and eleven texts that arrived simultaneously were the first indication that something had changed in the country I had left four days earlier. Somewhere north of Tokyo, in the coastal region of Tohoku, a tsunami had come ashore.