Kyoto in the Rain
The old capital is at its most honest when the skies open and the tour buses thin.
The bamboo grove at Arashiyama after rain.
Kenji Watanabe
Japan Editor
- Fushimi Inari before 7am
- Copying a sutra at the moss temple
- Kaiseki dinner in Gion
There is a Japanese word, shinrin-yoku, for the medicine of being among trees. Nobody has a word for the peace of a temple garden in the rain, but they should.
Moss as a national art
At Saihō-ji you are asked to copy a sutra before you are allowed into the garden. It feels like an imposition until you are kneeling with a brush, and forty minutes have passed without your noticing. Then the garden: a hundred and twenty kinds of moss, glowing under the grey light.
In Kyoto, grey is not the absence of colour. It is the colour that makes all the others speak.
The hour before the gates open
The trick to Kyoto is hours, not seasons. Be at Fushimi Inari at six in the morning, alone under the first of ten thousand vermilion gates. Pack the umbrella. Come in June, when everyone else has gone home.
Kyoto, Japan
Kenji covers Japan slowly and on foot — temples at dawn, mountain inns, and the quiet rituals of the table.
