In the summer of 1944, the United States began the systematic bombing of Japanese cities, a campaign designed to destroy Japan’s last resistance to the American demand for unconditional surrender.
The bombing, most of it at night, took a horrendous toll. Giant fires, set off by incendiary bombs, swept through Japan’s flimsy paper-and-wood cities. Sometimes by dawn’s light, as much as 60 percent of a target city’s buildings and structures would have disappeared.
But even immersed in their grim fury, the Americans knew there were two places that they knew they must not touch. The cost of doing so would have been to inspire a bitter enmity on the part of the Japanese toward the Americans that would have lasted scores, even hundreds, of years.
The first place was the ImperialPalace in Tokyo. Cooler heads in the U.S. government knew that there could be no enduring peace after the war if the emperor, the living icon of Japan and its people, were killed by American bombs. The American air crews that devastated Tokyo knew upon pain of death that they were to leave the ImperialPalace and its surroundings unscathed.
A section of the Byodoin temple complex
The second place so spared was the city of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan from 794 to 1868. For Kyoto, with its hundreds of temples, shrines, schools and castles was the nation’s religious and cultural heart. Imagine a city in the West that combines the religious aura of Jerusalem, the sagacity of ancient Athens and the cultural might of old Rome, and you would have the equivalent to Kyoto.
American sensibility paid off: the peace and friendship between the U.S. and Japan is deep and genuine, and Japan’s great postwar economic boom has financed lavish care and protection on Kyoto’s treasures. The world has taken notice, too: In 1994, UNESCO declared 17 ancient temples and shrines in the Kyoto area as World Heritage Sites, and the city itself a WorldHeritageCity.
The exquisite gate to Kamigamo Shrine
The shrines and temples, some dating from as early as the 8th century and progressing through to the 17th, give visitors a profile of the architectural fashions and changes Japan went through over a 900-year period. An irony is that the number of sacred structures recognized by UNESCO is less than a hundredth of Kyoto’s 1,800 shrines and temples.
But lovingly preserved buildings are only half of the city’s attractions. Kyoto is known all over Japan as a city of festivals – it hosts more than 500 of them a year. They range from small neighborhood bashes to country-wide attractions like the Gion Matsuri, held July 17, when 250,000 people crowd the city to celebrate a festival that began in 869 A.D. as a procession to plead for the intercession of the gods during a plague. The plague passed into history, but the massive parade, featuring 10-ton floats, each pulled by scores of young men, has endured.
If festivals and temple architecture begin the pale, Kyoto’s less-touted charms include almost as many baths as there are shrines, ranging from tucked-away little neighborhood places to high-tech facilities that can seem like a steamy Grand Central Station. There’s also many zanzen, Zen schools where everybody from the casually curious to full-tilt devotees can plumb Japan’s most famous religious export to the West.
Although Japan is small (the size of Montana), it has a continental climate. That means spring and fall are the best months to visit (summer is muggy and winter can be bitterly cold). Kyoto lies two hours southwest of Tokyo by bullet train and one hour from Osaka.
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