Kyoto– category –

Open a window on a Japanese train and somebody notices. The air conditioning is running. Someone's hair moves. Most passengers do not think of the window as a thing that opens at all, and anyone raised here learns to read the car before ...

A little after five o'clock, the last few visitors at Shinnyodo began drifting toward the gate. Then the sun set. Nobody else stayed. I did. It was November 28, 2025, the tail end of Shinnyodo Temple autumn color, and I had decided the m...

For ten months of the year, Eikando plays a supporting role. Then November comes, and the billing changes. Local TV in the Kansai region tracks how far its maples have turned on the morning news. TV Osaka's evening news has even gone liv...

Last autumn, a child standing next to me burst into tears. The child was staring at a yokai, entirely convinced it was real. I'd like to believe the tears had nothing to do with me. This was the Kyoto Yokai Festival at Toei Kyoto Studio ...

Amaterasu, the sun. Susanoo, the storm. Anyone who has read a single page of Japanese mythology knows those two, mostly because of the famous quarrel they had. There was a third child. Tsukiyomi, the moon, born alongside them when Izanag...

There is a god for smartphones. Search "Horinji Temple Arashiyama" and you will mostly find photographs of thirteen-year-olds in formal kimono. That is fair. It is what the temple is known for. But on its hillside there is a small shrine...

"Please relax your legs." Mine were already relaxed. I had given up on kneeling somewhere around the second minute, along with most of the room. This is how a visit to Suzumushi-dera Temple in western Kyoto begins: a hundred or so people...

The Rope Was Too Thick The rope surprised me first. At Matsuo Taisha, a shrine at the western foot of Kyoto, you announce your presence to the deity by shaking a braided rope to ring a bell, and when I closed my hand around this one my f...

When I traveled to Lisbon, one bridge name would not leave my head. Ponte 25 de Abril. The 25th of April Bridge, named for the date of the 1974 revolution. Nothing more. The city's other great bridge is the Vasco da Gama. A date and a ma...

The first thing I offered the gods at Nonomiya Shrine was silence. I tossed a coin at the offering box and the coin declined to go in. It hit the wooden rim, spun once, and settled there. No clatter against the bottom of the box. No smal...