by Holly
We heard about this activity from a friend of ours who was recently in Japan with her son. Apparently a thing to do in Kyoto is rent kimonos and walk around town in them to see some sights. We all love costumes in general so this sounded really fun to us.
I picked a rental shop (there are lots) close to where we wanted to walk around called Wargo Kimono Rental, just around the corner from Gion-Shijo station. They had a wide selection, prices were fair, and they clearly do a lot of volume and have the process down to a science. We bought add-on hair styling for the ladies in our party.
The weather was pleasant and it was surprisingly enjoyable to stroll around the historic Gion neighborhood admiring the buildings, temples, and gardens while dressed in costumes.
While the majority of the other kimono-strollers seemed to be foreign, I definitely overheard quite a few people dressed up speaking Japanese. Domestic tourists? We saw quite a few people who looked Japanese but then spoke American english, so maybe Americans with Japanese heritage coming to see the land of their ancestors. Talked with a few tourists from Taiwan and mainland China too.
I did wonder before we did this how Japanese people feel about foreigners coming to their country and dressing up in costume versions of their traditional clothes. I can certainly imagine some people could take that in a negative way. Would people view this as cultural appropriation? A degrading and trivial consumption of a pastiche version of a culture not our own for our ephemeral amusement?
Our outlook was that we went to Kyoto to learn about and experience some aspects of traditional Japanese culture, and while we recognize it is not our culture, it can be more powerful and more fun to at least partly put yourself into a more immersive experience. We love to go to living history museums in America and elsewhere for just this reason; even though it is obviously fake and all a put-on, seeing how things worked and how people dressed with your own eyes is just a different and altogether better way to learn something new. It is much more fun to wear a kimono than to look at one through glass in a museum. For instance: how heavy are those things? Are they comfortable? How do you pee? Are they hot? If I were choosing, I would like that pattern, etc.
So while I wasn't 100% comfortable doing this, it seemed mainstream enough that we went ahead with it.
One thing I find interesting about kimonos is that while they are structurally pretty straightforward, the fabrics used are so bold and colorful. So many other aspects of traditional Japanese aesthetic strive to be elegant exercises in understated simplicity, but these fabrics are about as flamboyant as you can imagine.
We first walked through Gion district along alleyways and small streets from the shop to the entrance of the Marayuma park complex. In doing so, we passed through a rally of the noisy ultra-right wing nationalists Uyoku dantai.
Like anyone who has spent any time in Japan, I had on previous occasions seen the convoys of flag and speaker draped black vans driving around Tokyo blaring martial music and xenophobic screeds at high volume. But for all the noise, they had seemed like a relatively uncommon activity and had been conducted in an orderly fashion. I don't think I had ever seen any people outside the vehicles on the street taking part in the demonstrations.
As we approached the entrance to the park on a side street, I heard the sounds of the speakers and thought to myself that maybe there were some nationalist vans driving by, but I wasn't sure. As we turned the corner, we encountered a phalanx of riot police with shields and batons lining the street with a huge convoy of black busses and vans slowly crawling past, blaring their usual fare from the ubiquitous loudspeakers. There were people with signs marching as well, and some were having heated words with the cops. Maybe we should have turned back there, but it didn't seem too crazy and there was a large volume of uninvolved persons coming in and out of the park just on the other side. I figured we could quietly slip past the commotion and get into the park. This plan may have worked if we hadn't been dressed up like peacocks in kimonos.
As we walked past, an older gentleman lost it and started screaming at the top of his lungs seemingly at us. He approached menacingly and seemed quite unhinged. I could not tell at all what he was saying; my japanese is extremely limited and I bet the things he was saying were not what I studied for vocabulary in the two semesters of japanese night school I took a few years back. Fortunately for us, two younger guys (probably plain-clothes police) grabbed him one on each arm and dragged him struggling away to another side street where police vans were waiting.
Needless to say this was terrifying for the kids, who have lived a lucky and privileged life thus far such that they have never encountered anything like that. Child 2 in particular took it hard and was crying and wanting to go back to change out of our clothes and go home. Of course this experience made me further question how appropriate it was for us to be dressing up like that at all.
Nonetheless we continued to the park, which was very beautiful, if a bit crowded. There were numerous school groups on tours; one of them wanted to take pictures with us while while practicing a little English.
We also saw what looked like a wedding procession. The couple must have either been important or well off! I wonder how much it costs to book this place as a venue. The outfits of all the wedding party were exceedingly well executed.
All the way up deep into the park, we were plagued by the increasingly distant but still audible amplified sounds of the nationalist rally, which served to dampen our spirits some. Further up in the park the crowds thinned significantly and it would have been a peaceful place for reflection, if not for the sounds of the rally.
We exited out the south side of the park on Nene-no-michi street and walked past a number of other picturesque shrines and temples. Kyoto is chock full of amazing stuff like this; walk down almost any street and you will see some. Here is an espaliered pine tree, with a limb probably 10 meters long.
I have been working on some apple tree espaliers in my backyard at home for about 6 years now. The sustained effort needed to accomplish even the modest results I have seen made me acutely aware of how much unbroken effort across many decades it would take to get this pine tree on some random building on the street looking like this.
One place along this street we decided to explore a little more was Kodaiji temple. We walked partway up the mountain inside the grounds of this temple and admired the beautiful buildings and landscaping. We ducked out of a rain shower under the wide eve of a temple building. While resting our feet and waiting for the weather to abate, we contemplated this freshly raked zen gravel garden.
Buster was excited to see they had a lovely bamboo grove, it being his favorite grass.
We had tea and dango at the tea house on the temple grounds.
We ended up walking about 10km this day. I had wanted to get the wood sandal geta at the rental shop, but they talked me out of it; maybe for the best.
We ducked into a small restaurant on the way back to the station and had an amazing dinner there. Possibly the best beef we have ever eaten; cost a fortune for four small bites but I'm glad we did that at least once. It had a sublime flavor and was almost like eating butter it was so tender. There are many wonderful things about living in Malaysia, but beef is not one of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment