| Featured Hometown |
| Kyoto, Japan |
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| Where Time Has No Meaning |
| From: tgcht1 |
| Though not my home by birth, Kyoto is the home where I feel most at home. Probably because the past is so present here. True, the old capital’s earliest history, which goes back to the Heian Period (around A.D. 800), merely glimmers in motes. But it’s not too difficult to exist in an echo of the Edo Period—two hundred years is nothing here. As for the present, hooligans daring to dress in the latest hip-hop ensembles seem fated to do so with a certain care and hesitation, resulting in a unique type: the tidy hip-hopper. If it’s not being ruined quite as quickly as other places, it’s probably because slowness is a hallmark of Kyoto. People shuffle, walking on the backs of their shoes, with the seeming purposelessness of koi on a cold morning. Only the bicycles—everyone, even my eighty-year-old landlord, seems to ride a bike—whiz by. But no one ever seems to be pedaling. They coast with an appealing, light whir and click, click, click. Ringing their bells. The street noise is fabulous. In the mornings monks seek alms by holding single, resounding notes that shake the old wooden machiya (houses). The recycling truck plays a theme that might accompany a troop of Henry Darger-esque girls carting castoff rice makers and PET tea bottles into the Higashiyama hills. Late on cold afternoons one is haunted by plaintive singing issuing from a small white truck that weaves through the warren of narrow streets—yaki imoooo, ishi yaaaaki imo (grilled potato, stone-grilled potato)—which in summer switches to: warabiiiiii (a type of fern) mochiiiii ice-uuuuuu cream-uuuuu. But my favorite truck music only emerges after dark, usually after I’m snug in my futon on the tatami, a tune that might occur at the entrance of Vincent Price in an old B-movie. What’s he doing here? Sad, sinister, and to what end I have no idea, having never seen the truck. In Kyoto, amidst the caws of crows heading to roost among the old temples on the hills, I can believe it’s the sound of a disgruntled samurai, or simply the past itself, seeping from the streets. |
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