We’re out of the hotel at 7:40 am. Starbucks is not open which seems strange since hundreds of thousand of Japanese are already of the subway on their way to work.
I’ve since learned that there is a McDonalds at the tram station that opens at 05:30 but I’m sure Brenda won’t eat there.
Our 9 hour tour is more than exhausting. At the end I’m barely able to walk. We go all over town: 2 subway rides, 3 bus rides, 3 train rides and 2 tram rides.
Our first stop is the Nijo-jo Castle which was built in 1603 by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who was the founder and the first Shogun of the Tokugawa Shogunate. This began a period of 260 years of peace and prosperity following a long period of civil war. The Shogun rarely visited so samurai were usually garrisoned here. The roof is made of cypress bark and the floor in the main castle building was made of wood and it chirped like a nightingale when we walked on it. A security measure.
SIGNS ALONG THE WAY
The Golden Pavilion was stop 2 and in 1994 became a World Cultural Heritage site. This is a Zen Buddhist temple of the Rinzai sect. The buildings were built in the early 1400’s but some have burned down and been rebuilt. The gold leaf on this temple was replaced in the 1980’s.
The most dramatic of all the sites today was the Fushimi Inari Shrine and the tens of thousands of vermilion gates that cover more that 4km of a trail up to a mountain top. Each of the gates are the result of donations from individual, families and corporations. This shrine was made famous in the film Memoirs of a Geisha.
Around 6pm we ended up in the area most likely to find Geisha girls, and we were not disappointed. The girls often entertain their clients for a 2 hour period and 3 parties per night. Mostly we saw geisha girls in training. They wear their own hair and if decoration is hanging close to their face they are in the first of 5 years of training. Girls decide whether or not to enter the training after the end of compulsory school which ends at age 15. First years also only paint their lower lip with red lipstick.
When a girls enters the geisha training she leaves her family and cell phone and lives in a training house with a geisha mother, such as the woman in the photo below. The trainees get 2 days off a month and spend their time learning the art of dance and musical performance and also the ceremonial service of food and tea to their clients who are mostly wealthy men but can also be groups of women.
Five of us find a decent restaurant near where the tour terminates. And then Brenda discovered we were only a few blocks from our hotel. Kyoto was hopping even more on Friday night. We got to visit the grand opening of the MOMA Kyoto Design Center, just around the corner from our hotel.
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