Kyoto

Our two weeks in Japan was scheduled to end with an early morning flight to Shanghai on January 8.  January 7 was a Saturday, and more importantly, a day off of work.  So Theresa and I finally went to Kyoto.

If Tokyo is the heart of Japan, then Kyoto is the soul.  Kyoto is to Japanese culture as is Xian to China, or Rome and Athens to Western Culture.  Kyoto was the primary city of Japan for nearly 1100 years, until the emperor moved to Tokyo in 1868.  You can't walk a block in the city without tripping over history - either a temple or a palace or a artifact of some sort.  Even in Chinese, the spelling of Kyoto, 京都, means the "capital of all".

Thanks to a quirk of fate, the historical beauty of Kyoto is well-preserved.  You see, during World War II,  Kyoto was chosen as one of the original targets for the atomic bomb.   We learned this when we visited Hiroshima.  With Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Kyoto was placed off-limits for conventional bombing.  No one knew how destructive an A-bomb would be.  So these cities were preserved to serve as true test cases to measure the power of the bomb.  It was only through the insistence of  Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War, that Kyoto was taken of the list.  Seems he was familiar with the legacy of Kyoto and thought it would be a travesty to destroy the city.

Kyoto is nestled inland, up in the mountains.  (See top-most photo...the city of Kobe lies in the valley below the setting sun.) The location betrays an origin in times when defense was more important than commerce.  If you drew lines between Kyoto and Kobe and Osaka, then you would have an equilateral triangle of 40 miles or so for each side.  From Kobe, it is about an hour by commuter train.

Today's Kyoto is very much a modern tourist city.  The second photo shows the Kyoto Tower looming over the train station in the city center.   This is the first site seen by the thousands of tourists that arrive each day.  Luckily, Kyoto is tourist friendly.  There is a huge tourist information center in the train station.  When we arrived, a very nice older gentleman gave us a map and laid out our travel plans for the day.  He even sold us a bus pass for the day.

Anywhere there are tourists there are bound to be lots of tourist shops.  Kyoto has it's share.  Nothing could be more touristic than a shop selling Japanese fans, like the one shown above.  Many of the tourist shops are bakeries for Yatsuhashi - the famous cinnamon cookies of Kyoto.  The third photo shows a woman hard-at-work making the Yatsuhashi.  She rolls the dough into thin sheets, cuts rectangles of about one inch by three inches, and then cooks the pieces on the griddle under the weight of wooden blocks.  When cooked, the cookies are still pliable.  She then places them on a cylindrical mold until they cool hard in the shape of a roof-tile.  The resulting cookie is like crunchy ginger-bread...except the taste is cinnamon instead of ginger.

By the way, the making of a Yatsuhashi is remarkably similar to the making of a Chinese Fortune Cookie....both are shaped while warm and only become crunchy upon cooling.   Truth-be-told, the Chinese fortune cookie has nothing to do with China.  It actually comes from Japan.  The baking methods of Kyoto were brought to America by Japanese immigrants and then co-opted by Chinese-American restaurants to produce the fortune cookies.  It's the same dough but with a lot less cinnamon.  And also a piece of paper twisted into the center of the cookie before it cools.

By the way, I've never seen a fortune cookie ANYWHERE in China.   Never.