A Day In Kyoto

NITIN CHAUDHARY remembers a pleasant day out in Japan’s old capital, in a time when such trips were still possible

- Nitin Chaudhary

A couple of years ago, I was in Japan on a business trip. I had reserved a Saturday to explore Kyoto and took the bullet train there.

I was expecting Kyoto to appear like a dreamy apparition in the Japanese countryside, punctuated with shrines at every corner with narrow streams snaking through it. But when the outskirts of the city appeared in the glass window, I was disappointed. It seemed like any other big city bursting at its seams. What I had expected would be a quaint town earmarked with Zen gardens turned out to be just another megapolis.

Or, so I thought.

Myth AND REALITY

At the train station, I approached the tourist office. After making a note of all I could cover before the day ended, I headed out first to Fushimi Inari Taisha, which is the head shrine of the Inari, located at the base of a 200m-tall mountain also named Inari.

Though Kyoto is a modern city with its fair share of modern apartments, the concrete façade melts away as one approaches the old part of town. I have always believed that travelling is like a modern-day time machine, and that belief was reiterated the moment I entered the shrine enclosure. As I stepped inside, my disappointment with the city melted away, and I was instantly transported to medieval Japan. The Inari complex has a main shrine surrounded with multiple smaller ones, and what this shrine is famous for is its Senbon Torii, a wooded archway painted in vermillion that leads all the way to the shrine on the top of the mountain.