11/3 - Gion, Kyoto

From K's House Kyoto, we walked out to the closest bus stop.  We were going to spend most of the day in the Higashiyama [東山] area of Kyoto.  This area is home to a lot of Kyoto's famous ancient buildings.  Our first stop would be Gion [祇園].  Gion is most famous for catching a glimpse of geisha, especially at night.  Our goal wasn't really to see geisha today, but to just walk around the neighbourhood.

In the Gion neighbourhood is also the Yasaka Shrine[八坂神社].  The shrine's bright red gate looks over one of the major intersections in Gion.  It's a huge intersection in fact.  It looks larger to me than most Canadian intersections because the corners are all rounded so it's easier for traffic to make left-hand turns (Japan drives on the left side of the road, so a left-hand turn is equivalent to our right-hand turn).

We walked up through the gate and wound our way past a few food stalls to the actual shrine.  There was no charge for walking through.  We lucked out on a small event at the shrine.  Some families were bringing their children to participate in Shichi-Go-San (七五三, seven-five-three) rituals.  Basically boys and girls who are aged 3, 5, and 7 were dressed up in traditional Japanese kimonos and .  So there were dozens of cute little kids in traditional wear walking around the shrine.  The proud parents were snapping away with cameras.  It was a very neat scene.

After our visit to the shrine, we went back out to the busier part of Gion on Shijo-dori.  We walked up and down the stretch.  There were a lot of souvenir stores given that Gion is popular with tourists.  Food shop vendors offered some small food samples of their special gift boxes.  One of the bigger shops on Shijo-dori was Yojiya [よじや].  Yojiya is a special cosmetics company that was founded in Kyoto in 1904.  Their most famous product is their oil-blotting facial paper.  We wandered through the store for a few minutes.  N ended up buying a little something, but not the blotting paper.

We walked down a little further and came across an okonomiyaki restaurant that was featured in N's Chinese-language travel book.  It is famous for the statue in the front.  The statue is made up of a boy and a dog.  The boy is in traditional Japanese clothing and he has a box of take out.  However, the boy is running and afraid because of the dog.  The little white dog has a firm bite on the boys pants and is literally pulling down the boy's pants revealing his little wee-wee.  It's very interesting what restaurants will do to get your attention and pull you into their restaurant.



We were walking back towards Yasaka Shrine to get the bus to our next stop for the day, when I noticed a sign post marking a special road.  The sign was only in Japanese and would read "Hanami-koji" in Romaji.  N said that this is the road where you can most likely find geisha.  However, because it was still morning, most of the restaurants and shops were closed.  We decided to walk up and down the street to see what was there.  Interestingly, there were no sidewalks on this street.  Pedestrians and cars just had to share the road.  We walked down to Gion Corner, a theatre that specializes in many different traditional arts from Kyoto.  On our way back from Gion Corner, we came across a little delivery van painted with a Canadian flag on its side.  The van even had a Vancouver address and phone number printed on the rear.  The van belonged to Seaborn, a company that sells Canadian gourmet food in Japan.  (So what is Canadian gourmet food and is it good business?)

We headed back to the road where we had been dropped off by the bus. We were now ready to head off to our next destination in the Higashiyama area - Kiyomizu-dera Temple.