After finishing the Philosopher's Walk, we were ready for lunch. Fortunately, Moti’s friend Mina-san had recommended a place for us to eat. It was a prix fixe menu with ten distinct bowls per person on a tray, each having a serving of a different culinary treat. This is not an uncommon style of Japanese meal. We ate at a long thin table along a plywood wall with Venetian-inspired art hanging from it. The size of a truly small Japanese eatery may be familiar to a Manhattanite, but is fairly unfamiliar throughout the rest of the U.S., as space is rarely at that much of premium.
We then met up with Mina-san herself on the way to our next attraction, Kiyomizu-dera. My memory had tricked me on the approach to the heritage site. I was incorrectly thinking it was further out of town, but instead we climbed directly from the streets of Gion to the entrance gate. The day was quite hot, but I recall the elevation helping. The aquatic theme of the complex certainly didn’t hurt; the name Kiyomizu means pure water and refers to a cascade down the foothills on which the mountain was built. As the picture on the left shows, the giant blocks were quite real, a consequence of renovations. Which is only fair as the current wooden buildings date back to 1633 and were constructed without nails.
The main building has a vast balcony, from which you can gaze out on the hills, see a pagoda dedicated to easy childbirth, or look down at the stone building where the water flows out of the hill and into the extended cups of waiting visitors. The view I most remembered from 2002 was looking back at this balcony, but before we would get there some of the group would brave crowds to walk up to Jishu-Jinja.
That Shinto shrine to Ōkuninushi, a god of love and good matches, is accessible through the Buddhist temple in a way that is not at all unusual in Japan but represents a blending of religions that I’m used to only seeing in ecumenical collaborations often driven by necessity or seeing in pictures of the trips to the Holy Land where sites are revered by multiple religions operating in close proximity. We’ll pick up with the visit to that shrine tomorrow.
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