Kyoto, the Town I Love

I'm returning to Japan after a long hiatus -- nearly five years. That's the longest absence since I first visited as student in 1973. This is a journal of my May 2010 very short trip to Kyoto, where I studied for a combination of three-and-a -half years during the 1970s. (At right, that's what I looked like when I first landed in Kyoto.)

I made every effort to revisit Kyoto when I was a journalist living in Tokyo in the 1980's and roving around Asia in the 1990's and early 2000's. I've seen Buddhist temples disappear and rice paddies drained, and rural hamlets demolished to make room for ferro-concrete homes. I grieved for the lovely shiden trolley system when it was torn up and replaced by shiny subway lines.

Some areas in the center of Kyoto are unrecognizable now as the old wooden buildings -- seasoned to a beautifully mottled dark-brown by decades and centuries of weather -- have been raised so that  architects could desecrate the city with contemporary eyesores.

Kyoto was spared fire bombing by the Americans during the Pacific War and removed from the short list of atomic bomb targets because right-minded people  recognized the crucial importance of its ancient cultural legacy to the Japanese and to the civilized world.

What does the city look like today? What's unchanged, such as the little red mailbox I constructed at the entry of of my apartment 33 years ago when I was foreign  student at Kyoto University. I'm told it's still there. (Thats me on the left when I last visited in 2006.) 


Is there something extraodinary and deep about Kyoto that you can't necessarily see but will endure for another thousand years?