Kyoto: Imperial Capital, Ten Thousand Gates, and the Bomb That Never Came

I went to Nara with Duncan, a Scotsman from a fishing village on the west coast whose name I kept meaning to write down, and Sarah from Adelaide, who approached every situation with the kind of practical cheerfulness that makes someone an excellent travelling companion. We had met at the hostel in Kyoto the previous evening, after I had spent an embarrassing amount of time in Yodobashi, an electronics store near Kyoto station that occupies several floors and contains more cameras, headphones, and lip balm variants than most countries produce in total. I spent approximately three hours in there and left without buying anything. This felt like either discipline or a missed opportunity.

Kyoto itself was the imperial capital for more than a thousand years, from 794 to 1869, when the Meiji Restoration moved the seat of government to Tokyo. The city’s name in its original form, Heian-kyo, meant capital of peace and tranquility, which was aspirational in the way that city names chosen by their founders often are. During the Onin War of 1467 to 1477, which was a dispute over the succession to the shogunate that grew into a general civil conflict, most of Kyoto burned. It burned again repeatedly over the following century during the wars of the Sengoku period. The temples and shrines that now give the city its character were rebuilt after each destruction, which is itself something worth sitting with: the Kyoto that tourists visit and describe as ancient is, in large portions, a reconstruction, the latest iteration of something that has been destroyed and rebuilt so many times that the original and the copy have blurred into each other.

What Kyoto escaped, and what it came extremely close to not escaping, was the atomic bomb. When the target list for the nuclear attacks on Japan was assembled in 1945, Kyoto was initially the primary target. Henry Stimson, the US Secretary of War, had visited the city in the 1920s on his honeymoon and understood its significance as a centre of Japanese culture and religion. He argued, against the recommendation of the Target Committee, that bombing Kyoto would produce a psychological effect on the Japanese population that would be counterproductive to the war’s end, and that destroying it would damage the United States’ relationship with Japan in any postwar settlement. His argument prevailed. Kyoto was removed from the list. Nagasaki, the secondary target for the second bomb after Kokura’s cloud cover made the primary mission impossible, was destroyed instead. The city I was walking through, with its thousand temples and its deer and its electronics stores the size of aircraft hangars, survived the war because a man in Washington had been there on his honeymoon.

The Fushimi Inari shrine south of the city has ten thousand torii gates, each one donated by a Japanese business or individual as a prayer to Inari, the Shinto deity of foxes, rice, agriculture, industry and worldly success, a portfolio that reflects the historical concerns of a rice-farming society and has adapted with reasonable flexibility to the concerns of a modern one. The gates climb the hillside for four kilometres in near-continuous tunnels of red lacquered wood, and walking through them at dusk with the light coming through the gaps and the bamboo pressing in on both sides produces a quality of stillness that I find very difficult to describe and entirely easy to remember. On the train back, a group of schoolchildren ran into our carriage, spent the entire journey whispering about us, and at the next stop said “see you later” in careful collective English and fled the train in a controlled explosion of excitement. We waved. They went completely wild.

The following morning I nearly missed my flight to Hong Kong. I had calculated the train times from Kyoto to Osaka city to Osaka airport the previous afternoon with what I believed to be appropriate care and had made one catastrophic assumption: that the train from Osaka city to its international airport would take approximately ten minutes. The airport is on an artificial island in Osaka Bay, connected to the mainland by a dedicated rail line that takes fifty minutes. I arrived at the gate with the boarding door closing and was escorted through staff channels by a woman who had clearly done this before and whose expression communicated a kind of professional sympathy that stopped just short of exasperation. The flight was boarding. I got on it.

Landing in Hong Kong, I turned on my phone. Forty messages. The earthquake that had struck the Tohoku coast of Japan while I was in the air had a magnitude of 9.0.