Japan diaries 3: Kyoto

After Kawaguchiko and the battle with Fuji-san the trip went to Kyoto for a small week, and then a few days worth of sightseeing in Hiroshima. For Kyoto we had booked a few bunkbeds in K’s House, a popular hostel, especially for young people. In Hiroshima, just the two nights, we splurged on a good hotel called Oriental.

A bit about Kyoto
Kyoto is first and foremost famous for being the original and ancestral home of the Japanese emperors throughout history. Tokyo only became the capital of Japan in the late 19th century during the industrialization. Kyoto is a bustling metropolis built in the middle of a circle of beautiful, lush mountains and is at once a city with a pulse yet somewhat isolated from the rest of Japan. A saying is that if you only have a few days to stay in Japan, Kyoto is the place to go — it has a little bit of everything Japan has to offer. Lui and I whole-heartedly agree with this notion.

K’s House
K’s House, as our hostel was called, is a series of hostels present in most big cities in Japan, very popular and very, very nice. The price is a bit steep for a hostel, but it is worth every penny. Everything is clean, the staff speak great english and are very helpful, the rooms are nice and cool(Kyoto is a very hot city), and the people you meet there are very interesting.

We arrived the day before the Football World Cup Final, so a big TV had been set up in the common room, and posters were evident about the scheduled celebration. A curious fact is that in Japan, the TV-day extends beyond 24 hours, it is only reset to the actual hour when you go to sleep. A bit fuzzy explanation, I know, but that was how it was explained to me by the hostel staff when I asked why the match was scheduled to be played on July 11th on 27:30

Awesome people
Everything about Kyoto was an adventure, including the people we met. Lui and I are fans of the trading card game known as Magic, so we had brought a box of cards, this particular series inspired by Japanese mythology, for the trip. By sheer accident we stumbled into a couple of American Yu-Gi-Oh players, Courtney and Aaron, who expressed interest in learning Magic, so we borrowed them a couple decks and taught them the rules and played a few matches. It was loads of fun, and they were generally awesome people.

They told us about this card store in Kyoto where you could buy Magic, Yu-Gi-Oh and a lot of other trading card games. We actually went there and saw their impressive displays of cards — most in Japanese, but a few in english too. I even bought a handful of cards for favorable prices, in Japanese of course.

I also met a Canadian guy whose name cannot be pronounced, so he told me to go with Marc, and I did. He actually worked on the hostel, planning to stay in Kyoto for a year — he did two months of travelling Japan last year, like we are doing now, and was so enamoured with the country in general and with Kyoto specifically, that he decided to work and live here for a year. He was familiar with the city already, so I asked him about an electronics store — as mentioned earlier, my camera got smashed in Kawaguchiko, so I needed a replacement. Marc just so happened to know both a place to get cameras, as well as a fair bit about what to get and what not to get, so off we were. I got my camera alright, a Pentax camera with 12.1 megapixels for just around 750 yen — it would have cost more than double that price in Denmark, so it was a bargain.

We also met a bunch of american and french people with whom 3-4 hours went with playing the International Backpackers Game: Uno. I was having so much fun with the “french rules” they were teaching us that it didn’t occur to me to take pictures, so there are none, sadly, but it was a great time. In the group was also an american man named Mark Rosa, living in Tokyo on vacation in Kyoto. His father was an american soldier on Okinawa, so he had lived a lot of his life in Japan already, so it felt natural to him to travel there again. He told us a lot of awesome stuff about the culture on Okinawa, where we are going after Hiroshima and Fukuoka.

Doing Kyoto
Kyoto is an awesome city, it’s only drawback being it’s humid climate and lot of rain. We went for a lot of sightseeing, visiting the Imperial Palace, going to the top of Kyoto Tower and strolling around in the old Geisha area of Kyoto.

The Imperial Palace was the home, and after the coup d’etat by the Tokugawa-clan of Shoguns also the prison, of the Emperor of Japan for centuries until the Meiji Restoration that abolishhed the Shogunate and put the Emperor back into power. You have to reserve and pay for a guided tour in order to get inside, though, so we got no further than the gates, but it was still quite an experience. You could really feel the history of the place.

A goal while in Japan had also always been to visit an arcade. We originally feared we would have to wait until we returned to Tokyo before having the chance to experience one, but by chance we stumbled upon one a few minutes walk from K’s House, just above a Pachinco-hall.

The place had all sorts of games and lived up fully to the platonic arcade we had read about in Japanese legendry. It had rows upon rows of obscure fighting games based on animes we had never heard of before, one more strange than the other. We played one coop game where you entered the role of a couple of female fairy superheroes that shot pink laserbeams and had a special move that blew up everything on the screen. It was the most bizarre gaming experience I’ve had in a long time.

I was happy to see that Tekken 6, a game I’ve been playing for more hours than I’d ever admit on my X-box 360, was also present there. It was also, incidentally, the only game where I wasn’t completely smacked to bits and pieces by the other arcade guests — I still lost every fight, but it was a close call every time.

It wasn’t a close call, however, on one machine called “Actress Again”. We both played the machine for about a minute before we were both annihilated soundly by what appeared to be an insane AI. We saw others sit down and play the machine, only to get completely smacked to bits in a few seconds too. Later we realized that the insane AI was actually a dude sitting on the other side of the row, slamming buttons and winning every fight in a few seconds.

One evening we also went out to see the Geisha area of Kyoto and have a little sample of their nightlife. Both was very satisfying, although I myself went home because I still was sick from Fuji-san and it started raining. The Geisha area was very old Japanese style in it’s look and feel, and it had this vibrant, cozy atmosphere.

Kyoto Tower was also an attraction we had to take a look at, it being the tallest building in the city, and the city being encapsulated by mountains, so we could see all around the city from up there.

After Kyoto will be the world famous city of Hiroshima, a bustling metropolis and a living piece of history.