Tag: Kyoto

Japan Day Nine: A Kyoto Geisha Tour With Mr Panasonic, 28 October 2018

Having unintentionally done so much touring yesterday, we really did take it easy in the morning. I wanted to do some write ups and organise the ludicrous number of photos we’re generating; both of us wanted to rest/spa a little and be ready in good time for today’s tour and for tomorrow’s off.

So we sat in the main restaurant/grill/bar area for some while after breakfast while I fiddled around, then both returned to the room for some spa and (in my case) more writing up.

How those hours flew by goodness only knows, but we still ended up rushing to be on time for our guide, Eiji Hiraki, who had sent us a reminder note by fax asking us to be punctual.

Eiji turned out to be a quite extraordinary character. He had headed up sales for Panasonic in the Americas for most of his career until, a few years ago, (in my words, not his) retiring and taking up guiding for fun. His other avocations include mountain walking and playing Beatles songs on the guitar.

He is remarkably fit for a seventy-year-old and kept striding ahead of us, while we (surely fit enough) wanted to dwell over some things – but not others. He seemed to think that we would want to spend time and money in gimcrack shops, for example, until we showed no interest in those. But we did want to try black sesame ice cream which slowed him down a little.

Along the way, I learnt that Eiji broke all sales records for Panasonic in the Americas in his time, that Sony was his main competitor and that he spent every night dreaming of how to beat Sony. I concluded that it was far more fun being his client than it would have been to be his employee or, even worse, his competitor.

Eiji seemed a little edgy throughout, in as much as he was insistent that the highlight of our afternoon would be some drinks and snacks in a bar with/on him. Frankly, we were happy to whizz through much of the itinerary, as long as we could see the highlights and linger on the bits that interested us, which we did.

To speed up proceedings, Eiji had produced his own visual aids to explain Kyoto’s history, the way the geisha/maiko system works and so on. Those visual aids really did work, for both of us and especially for Daisy who hates guides who lecture at  length, which Eiji didn’t.

So we saw the Gion district north and south, including Hanami-koji’s tea shops. We wandered around the Yasaka Shrine, we crossed the Tatsumi Bashi Bridge and thus the Shirakawa Canal.

We saw no real geishas or maikos – tourists rarely do, it seems. The streets are thronging with young women who have hired kimonos for the day – mostly Chinese tourists according to Eiji – making the area look very attractive but the geishas are going about their business far more privately.

We have long been fascinated by geishas and how all of that stuff works. When Janie and I first started to go out with each other, my mother seemed to be under the misapprehension that Janie herself was a geisha girl…at least I think that’s what mum said.

Anyway, apparently, these days, the going rate for a well-trained maiko (i.e. a trainee geisha) is about £700 per hour, which is almost enough to make a Big Four Accountancy Partner or Magic Circle Solicitor blush,,,

…I said ALMOST enough.

Once we had ascertained that there were no geishas to be seen, we jumped in a cab downtown to the junction of Shijo Street and Kawaramachi Street, where several big department stores reside and the busiest pedestrian junction in Kyoto. Eiji pointed out a couple of stores, including Takashimaya, where he rated the restaurants, especially the tempura one, if we wanted to eat straight after our drinks and snacks.

Then Eiji took us down a side street to a new bar he was keen to patronise. An extensive drinks menu and snacks list might have been the draw. Plus the spanking newness of the rest rooms etc. perhaps.

So we chatted, drank sake, plum wine and (in Eiji’s case) highballs. We also snacked on edamame beans, salmon sashimi and cucumber with a delicious sweet miso paste – we also at that juncture handed over our respective gifts and sang “All My Loving” a-capella in three part “harmony”.

A very nice, lively fellow drinker took our picture for us and then told us in painfully broken English that his daughter is in London studying fashion while working in a ramen shop and that he hoped to visit London next summer. You have no idea how difficult it was to discern that content, nor how much effort this keen chap was putting in to trying to make us understand his English. It reminded me of a Two Ronnies sketch.

I think we could have carried on drinking with Eiji had we wished, but Janie and I have no real head or stomach for boozing, especially when we have an early start and a long journey the next day. In any case, I had visions of waking up the next morning to discover that I have signed an order for several thousand Panasonic rice cookers and tens of thousands of Panasonic video recorders, so we thought best to thank Eiji and bring an end to proceedings. We headed back to the junction, said goodbye to Eiji and sort-of intended to head back to Gion for the yakitori meal we had half-promised ourselves…

…except we hadn’t tried tempura in the city of tempura and Eiji had said that the yakitori is excellent in Osaka…

…so we relented and did as the master salesman suggested – we ate in the Tsunahachi Tempura restaurant in Takashimaya, which was an excellent meal and great fun.

I managed to blob a piece of tempura squid onto my shirt early in the meal, much to the hilarity of a lady diner at the counter, who was trying to be a polite lady by missing my gaze, but clearly couldn’t stop watching us and finding us a mixture of fascinating and hilarious. The restaurant should have paid us a fee for entertaining the customers. £700 per hour would secure our services as entertainers, eh, Daisy?

We retired to the hotel by cab, tired but exhilarated by another truly fun day.

All the pictures from Day Nine can be seen by clicking the Flickr link here or below:

Japan Day Eight: Kyoto Tea Ceremony But Otherwise Unguided Day, 27 October 2018

Both of us were feeling just a little below par first thing this morning; nothing specific but probably the sensory excesses of the last week or so, combined with the slight over-indulgence of last night’s wonderful meal.

We agreed that we’d make it a light touring day after the short morning activity we had pre-arranged – a tea ceremony.

We had quite a long list of things we fancied seeing, but most or even all of them could wait until tomorrow if we didn’t feel like doing much, which we didn’t.

That was the plan.

But then, we all know what can happen to plans.

The tea ceremony was very interesting and great fun. A courier with the unconventional Japanese name Jim took us to the venue, then disappeared. Nine of us in a group, hosted by the Women’s Association of Kyoto – WAK. And what a “waky” experience it was too.

Daisy and I had done a tea ceremony before, at Yaohan Plaza “back in the day”, but it wasn’t then explained as comprehensively as this and frankly I recall not much liking the taste of the matcha – i.e. powdered green tea, when I tasted it at Yaohan.

The Kyoto style demonstrated by the charming WAK lady is a frothy style of matcha, far less bitter than the stuff I recall from Yaohan. Daisy still didn’t like it much, but I am now a bit of a green tea aficionado and really enjoyed the Kyoto tea ceremony tea – slurp slurp.

Of course, the ceremony requires everyone to bow and follow a strict ritual of manners in an environment that has been very specifically set out to be a tea room – the explanatory leaflet we were given at the end of the visit runs to 16 pages for goodness sake. Most importantly, if you like the tea you slurp the last drop.

One couple in our group were relatively young honeymooners from London who, it transpired afterwards, are great fans of Atari-Ya – our Japanese fishmonger and supermarket, but they use the Finchley branch. Daisy also spoke at some length with an Irish lady from Waterford who was there on her own. There was another couple, in their case from Yorkshire. The final pair was  from France (a grandmother and grandson combination I guessed, but perhaps a wealthy lady taking the current French Presidential age difference fashion to an illogical extreme.)

Revived by our cuppa and inspired by the improved weather, we decided to go to the Kyoto Botanical Garden, as Daisy wanted to see bonzai trees and we knew there was a regular exhibit of many of them.

We were near a subway line and I had worked out that the mere two subway lines could nevertheless whisk us to a few of the remaining places we wanted to see for the small investment of 600 Yen (if you were prepared to forego the right to suffer on the buses).

That subway pass investment paid a dividend almost immediately when, as I ventured to procure our entry tickets to the Botanical Garden, the nice ticket lady spotted my pass and announced a small discount on our entry tickets as a result. The sums involved are trifling yet I’m sure I looked pleased to have scored a few dozen Yen and she looked delighted to have helped me.

The Botanical Garden is a very charming place and was a great opportunity to see all manner of plants and flowers which especially interests Janie but also (in such a pleasant setting) also pleased me.

We spent quite a while there, meandering around the various well-labelled and well set out exhibits, also looking at many small show gardens which were getting ready to be judged in a competition. Some were a bit gimmicky (e.g. the Halloween and dinosaur themed ones) but many were very beautiful and tastefully symbolic.

We took some ice cream (chestnut again, I thought not quite as nutty and whippy as Tsumago, but Janie thought just as good) at the cafe in front of the central lawn. I pondered the possibilities for said lawn as a cricket pitch – you know what I’m like.

Then we looked at the bonzai trees and then felt replete with gardens. Except we still hadn’t seen the sky walk and sky garden at Kyoto Station, of course. That was a simple few stops away on the subway. So we went on there.

It still took some finding – it’s not exactly signposted but once you start going up escalators it is obvious what you should do next, whereas wandering round at ground level with our baggage the previous day looking for signs had been hopeless.

Up we went and of course the architecture of the place is stunning and some of the views of Kyoto also worth the effort. Mostly it’s the place itself, though.

Then we thought we might try to find spare batteries for our  LUMIX cameras, as our models, which suit us fine, are becoming dated and/but the bit that is most likely to go first is the batteries, which are already displaying signs of holding less charge than they once did.

Almost miraculously, while I was trying to navigate around the station to get to the “camera shop near me” recommended by Mr Google to the west side of the station, we quite by chance spotted a promotional stand with what looked like Yayoi Kusama pumpkins on it.

It transpires that the Kyoto Contemporary Art Museum is showing a retrospective on her and it is open until 18:00. That museum was on my “possibles list”, although I had discounted the possibility that we might see many, if any Kusama pieces there.

We resolved to head for that place after sorting out the LUMIX battery business. We found the camera shop but sadly were informed that our particular LUMIX batteries can no longer be found in Kyoto. We should have more luck in Osaka.

The camera shop – more like an electronics and chemist department store – was able to supply us with some nice mineral bath salts and one or two other chemist-type products, so we hadn’t completely wasted our time there.

Next stop, Sanjo Kehan station, on the fringes of the shopping district and the Gion district. The shopping side looked dull whereas the lure of the Forever Modern Art Museum was greater, especially when Mr Google told us it was a mere 15 minutes walk away…

…or rather, it would have been a mere 15 minutes had we not bumped into Martin and Jane, with whom we had done the food and culture stroll around Takayama only a couple of days ago. It was really nice to see them again and to swap stories from our different adventures of the last 48 hours or so.

Soon we realised that we would need to stride with purpose if we were to be sure of getting to the Yayoi Kusama in time. We did make it and were astonished to find that it was a substantial retrospective exhibition – basically the Forever Modern has been entirely purposed for this exhibition. After all that fuss in Tokyo and knowledge that Kusama’s London show is also sold out – this excellent one in Kyoto we just walked up and paid to get in on the door. Daisy was like a proverbial pig in shit.

I also enjoyed the exhibition but my goodness we were both tired when we came out of that place. We had meant it to be a light day of touring.

We resolved to eat at the hotel, intending it to be a light evening of eating too – we both had a crazy craving for some Western food. But the set menu looked so tempting, both in terms of the dishes on offer and relative price (exceptionally expensive place for food, the Hyatt), that we relented and enjoyed Caesar salad, clam chowder, ribs’n’beef with mash/veg and an “apple pie” which was in truth a cross between Grandma Jenny’s apple pie and mum’s apple strudel. Nice wines too.

A fine end to a fine day.

All the pictures from Day Eight can be seen by clicking the Flickr link here or below:

Japan Day Seven: Journey To And Guided Orientation In Kyoto, 26 October 2018

We made an early start this morning, leaving Best Western and Takayama behind on an 8:00 train. A busy but peaceful ride back to Nagoya.

Then a shorter but more heaving carriage between Nagoya and Kyoto – we were with a huge group of huge Aussies with huge suitcases – just as well we got on the train quickly and grabbed our corner of the baggage rack early. That vignette will be captured in a short King Cricket piece in the fullness of time.

Postscript: “the fullness of time” turned out to be 31 March 2020, by which time most of the world was in pandemic lockdown. Still, the vignette reads very nicely on King Cricket:

A cricket book on a Bullet Train to Kyoto

Just in case anything ever goes awry with King Cricket, I have scraped that piece to here.

We looked briefly but in vain for a route up to the sky walk and sky garden in Kyoto station – strange, as we were so close to it but it is not well signposted and probably just as well because we had our bags with us. So we got a cab to the hotel where they were able to accommodate us early in an annex room – larger, near the spa but without a view.

Losing track of time, we realised that we would be meeting our guide, Moto Suzuki, very soon, so we popped downstairs to grab a quick snack ahead of our tour. There I saw, sitting quite close to our table in the lounge section, a slightly nervous looking fellow who I guessed might be Moto a few minutes early for his gig. It was him.

Moto immediately announced that we wouldn’t have time in four hours to visit all of the sites on the list that he, Moto, had faxed to us, in a note that was waiting for us on arrival. This all seemed a little odd to me as we had very little in the way of expectations from this half-day tour before he sent his note, other than, as in Tokyo, an element of orientation while seeing some highlights of the city.

Anyway, we quickly ascertained that two temples in one afternoon would be one temple too many. I also hatched my plan, in search of the elusive dish, Kakuni, to end up in the neighbourhood where the TripAdvisor punter had recommended a restaurant, Miki, for that very dish.

Public transport in Kyoto is not at all like public transport in Tokyo. Of course it is a much smaller city, but that doesn’t really explain the disjointed transportation system, for which a spaghetti mind might just help, whereas the orderly mind would surely be prone to confusion.

Even Moto seemed to struggle with some of the whys and wherefores of it, but we set off on foot, then went to a local railway line (off the two-line subway system) where he needed to pay separately, before getting us to a more regular line where he was able to buy day passes for us.

By a mixture of these methods, including buses, Moto took us to see, first, Nijo Castle, which was fascinating and steeped in history, which Moto explained patiently and very well. The real castle part of that c1600 complex was destroyed by lightening in the early 1700s, but the larger, surrounding complex of castle buildings has been preserved.

I was especially taken by the stunning ceiling work and by one carved piece, in the partition between two rooms, carved from a single ultra-thick plank of wood with ornate designs such as peacocks on one side and a totally different, slightly less ornate, carving on the other side, despite each carving including many features that are carved all the way through the piece of wood.

What sort of mind could possibly design such a complex piece? The sort of mind that would, 400 years later, be able to navigate the Kyoto transportation system perhaps. No really, the craftsmanship was exquisite.

Nice gardens at Nijo too, together with a relaxed atmosphere when walking around the site.

Next, a comfort-lite journey, mostly by bus, to another part of town to see the Golden Temple. This is really a very beautiful reconstruction of the original temple (destroyed by mad-monastic arson in the 1950s) but in its charming garden setting and the late afternoon sunlight it was an absolute delight to the eyes and to the camera lens.

Daisy and I competed feverishly to find the very best angle and capture the light in the very best way in our photographs – hence there being dozens of them in the complete photograph deck, but in the end we decided that the match ended as a high-scoring draw.

There was a small gaggle of Russian women taking photographs of each other posing like crazy. I felt loathe to encourage them by snapping at them myself,  but suggested that Daisy capture that moment. She actually snapped the best looking of the gaggle, plus separately the rest of the gaggle.

As expected, we were out of time in terms of seeing the other temple and by the time we had meandered back to the subway somewhat circuitously to avoid the rush hour crowds, we didn’t have time to see Higashiyama and also track down the Miki place for our Kakuni.

Still, Moto was very happy for me to eat his brain on thoughts for what we might see and how we might get around during our copious free time in Kyoto. So in terms of orientation, the outing was a great success…

…as indeed, it proved to be in the matter of finding Kakuni, but not in the way we expected. We took a long hike from the K-line station to the west-side location where Miki (and supposedly Kakuni) were to be found. We took some nice evening photos along the way.

We also furnished Moto with a gift of Harrods biscuits in a fancy tin, which seemed to please him beyond measure – I get the impression that only a minority of visitors take gifts for their guides in this non-tipping (but gift-accepting) culture.

We hastened our step as we approached the Miki restaurant, but…it transpired that the Kakuni was off the menu at Miki’s now. Oh woe. Oh sorrow.

It was our good fortune that Moto is a bit of a Kakuni fan. His wife makes Kakuni at home and he was even able to recommend us his favourite ramen restaurant in Tokyo; the only one to his knowledge that serves Kakuni in ramen.

The bit we didn’t realise was that Kakuni is actually a regional dish, from a southern island, Kyushu, hence its scarcity, even in big cities. Moto came up trumps by tracking down a restaurant that specialises in food from that region and phoning them to confirm that they had Kakuni available and a place for us to eat.

He then insisted on taking us to the location to make absolutely sure everything would be all right for us. The location turned out to be the plaza underneath the Mitsui Building and the restaurant named Satuma Gokamon Shijo Karasuma (don’t try saying that after two or three sakes).

Unlike most of the other (many) eateries in that plaza, our one was very full and entirely populated with Japanese customers apart from us. Nevertheless, they did (sort of) have a menu in English (a more limited card) and one waiter who spoke excellent English who could help us to go “off-piste” (or rather, “on Japanese piste” menu-wise).

We had a superb meal. Portion sizes were quite small (but then so were prices per dish), so we ordered a second helping of Kakuni (having come all this way and with such difficulty). We also tried chicken nanban and satsuma-age fish cake, both of which were excellent.

It was a great fun evening, which we could bring to a tired end easily enough, as the one aspect of the transport system in Kyoto that seems to work very well, very easily and is (relative to other cities and Japanese prices generally) reasonably priced is the taxi system – most places cross-town for a tenner or less. And the taxis can move in Kyoto too. That final lesson in orientation was possibly the most useful of the lot.

All the pictures from Day Seven can be seen by clicking the Flickr link here or below: