Kyoto Notebook
Small Buildings of Kyoto
Small Buildings of Kyoto features 100 images of the quaint homes, businesses, workshops, as well as the occasional neighbourhood shrine and teahouse, that make up the fabric of Japan’s ancient capital.
Read More1970s Kyoto
My roommate moonlights as a desk clerk at a guest house for foreigners and cuts most of his classes so he is seldom home. Most of the other boarders spend evenings in each other’s rooms screaming and jostling each other amid the familiar click and clatter of mahjong pieces being scrambled across a kotatsu table. This is there last fling at wasting time before the responsibilities of company employment and family beckon after graduation.
Read MoreKyoto Waters
Kyoto exists in layers of wildness and control; something built juxtaposed with something natural: one against the other, layered, intertwined, spiraled infinitely around the plain, a kind of DNA of place.
Read MoreThe Philosopher’s Walk: Nishida Kitaro’s Contemplative Route
Taking a daily walk helped him to switch his mood. He therefore began a daily routine, walking not only to the Silver Pavilion (Ginkakuji) but to the Honen’in and Nanzenji area, where the scenery is exquisite.
Read MoreThe Enlightening of Aikido: Jacques Payet on training, practice and teaching
“Through time the student would become a better person; one who is more aware of weak points, more courageous and more honest, through a body-to-body and heart-to-heart experience…”
Read MoreZen & the Art of Rejuvenation
Taizo-in launched its groundbreaking ‘Fusuma-e Project’ in the spring of 2011. The Zen temple is commissioning a young, unknown Kyoto-based artist to compose large sumi-e ink paintings on 64 new sliding doors, or fusuma…
Read MoreOf All the Wild Sakura: The Journals of Gary Snyder
My first stay in Japan was from May of ’56 to August ’57. I left to get a change of air, to reflect on my Zen practice, and to earn some dollars.
Read MoreA Sense of Place: Urban Renewal in Kyoto
Of all cities in East Asia, Kyoto has the oldest and probably the strictest official preservation policy…
Read MoreKyoto Rain
Kyoto belongs to the rain. Not a place of brilliant sunlight, it is often sadly gray — an older woman who causes one to remark how beautiful she must once have been.
Read MoreKyoto’s Forgotten Era
A century ago Kyoto was “The city that does everything first.” Today it is “the ancient capital” and “the city of temples and shrines.” Kyoto’s development of leading-edge technology however, continues today…
Read MoreA Festival of Ages
Imagine Kyoto in the year 1868… To symbolise the new dawn it had been decided the emperor should move his capital to Tokyo. When the day of his departure came, thousands of citizens lined the streets, many distraught and in tears.
Read MoreIn the Eternal Now
BY KEN RODGERS
Overlooking Kyoto from his sacred mountain — one hand shading his eyes against the southern sun — the Bishamonten of Kurama has seen it all. Purple dawns, golden sunsets, the habitual arcs of moon and planets, seasons of rice-plantings, harvests, fire festivals…
Read MoreThe Open Homeless
Over the past eight years, Ryuta and Chieko Kobayashi have resided in shelters made of cardboard and wood, crafted with their own hands, under the Kojinguchi Bridge on the Kamo River…
Read MoreBehind the Brocade Curtain
In the early 1990s I unwittingly moved into a Gion Festival neighborhood…One day I literally stumbled upon the festival’s gigantic floats, some as high as downtown buildings, and marveled at their exquisite adornments of exotic textiles and carvings. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but it blew my mind.
Read MoreThe Path to Honen-in
For a man who wears so many caps, the shaven-headed priest exudes a genial calm. He talks openly and from the heart; here is none of the closed manner for which Kyoto is famous.
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