The Kamogawa

2012

鴨川  

The soul of Kyoto isn’t in the superb handicraft, the Maiko geisha trainees, or the myriad of temples and gardens.  You’ll find it here on the Imadegawa Bride, overlooking the confluence of two rivers.

Here the Takano River spills down from the northeast to join the great Kamo River flowing from the north hills, which in antiquity created a fertile basin for the curing of a civilization.

View from Imadegawa Bridge

  Both rivers have been tamed over the centuries with   stone embankments, culverts and dams. In central Kyoto  the dams are shallow and thin and have been erected in neat straight lines across the rivers; they can roar with white water in the rainy season and train the waters to ripple delightfully down the Kamo as it flows through the center of the city, past the old tea houses and hoary restaurants that line western bank.  

The River at Twilight

The Kamo is an assumed aspect of the natural environment because it’s been captured within the confines of a built environment  There is an aesthetic in Japan that values the representation of nature more than nature itself and the Kamo is a perfect example. It’s a hill-and-water garden, like the stream, rock and bridge representations you see on a smaller scale within the walls of the city’s Buddhist temples. The Kamogawa and it’s tributary the Takanoga, perhaps, have served as a models for the art of turning nature into craft and craft into beauty.

In recent decades Kyoto has restored parts the riverr into their original riparian environment in the northern part of the city, creating open wetlands in areas that had once been boxed in and artificial. More recently, city planners have made the river more open to the public with parks and improve trail along its banks that are teeming with joggers, mothers pushing strollers and small children running wild. The Kamogawa is alive in a way that I couldn't have imagined thirty years ago. It's always beautiful in a dignified way, but now it's exciting.

Joggers and Strollers

The headwaters of the river are in the mountains to the north near the isolated village of Kumogahata.  The hamlet is practically a ghost town in the off-season with its half-dozen loges shuttered. Kumogahata's population has declined to the point where it's had to shut down its schools and send its remaining children the city for their education, a phenomenon that is typical in aging communities in rural Japan these days.  Kumogahata gets only two micro-buses a day to link it to the city, which are mostly used by hikers. Personal cars have to negotiate a winding one-lane road to the city.

The approach to Kumogahata

One of thy cascades on the way to the source

A long hike takes you to Shnmyoin, a temple of the ancient tantric Shingon sect of Buddhism, which guards the approach to the river's source. The surrounding forests were once the private hunting preserve for the earliest of emperors

Shimyoin Temple

Pilgrims and hikers are forbidden to take their camera's past the gate that opens to a steep and slippery path and rugged stairways leading to a partitioned cave said to be the very source of the water, which seepa and drips through the surrounding rock formations and feeds the little rippling waterfalls down stream.

Absolutely pure water flows from the tsukubai basin at Shimyoin 

Downriver, the Kamogawa widens as it's jointed sby treams and little tributaries and it froths with waterfalls until it flows into the city and gently merges with Takano River at the Imadegawa Bridge.

Sunday stone-hoppig at the river fork

School boys hanging out by the downtown Shijo Bridge,