Observing the Observers

An American Undercover in Kyoto's Sacred Spaces

“Temples.”

Temples.

Of course. I should’ve seen that coming. I asked, “What’s there to do in Kyoto?”

What the hell was I expecting? Tea? Kaiseki? A sake brewery? A private little geiko show?

Anything where I could sit and have my senses regaled without having to walk a thousand steps?

The dream of sedentary pleasure vanished as soon as I heard the word: Temples.

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I was supposed to be on vacation. I'd been talking to an Asian Studies professor friend of mine. He spit out “temples” as soon as he heard “Kyoto,” as if he were playing a life-and-death game of word association.

The Professor and I are both Japanese Americans from Hawai‘i, and have been close going back to middle school, where we both received mediocre grades in Japanese class. We were more concerned with finding a real-life manga girl with green hair and horns in a tiger-striped bikini than learning the mother tongue of our ancestors. To be honest, we were downright horrible, torturing the young sensei to entertain us with stories of her tutoring Brooke Shields in Japanese, or asking her how fast the shinkansen could go— all so that she’d forget to make us do oral drills.

We barely made it out of there with a ‘C’ average.

In the intervening years, my friend surpassed me in Nihongo while working toward a doctorate in Asian History. He spent time abroad in the old country, and even found himself an Osaka bride. I, on the other hand, specialized in making pitchers of beer disappear with my college wrestling teammates. I managed to pass my classes by paying neurotic girls in frizzy sweaters to type up my handwritten term papers. That is, if I wasn’t dating them, in which case the typing was free.

Destiny—or inherent laziness—led us both back home to Honolulu. The Professor got his tenure at a local university and became a part-time resident of Osaka. I settled into a paycheck career in federal law enforcement with a three-letter agency, and found myself writing noir detective novels.

Hawai‘i is a place where the Japan of our immigrant great grandparents is frozen in a tropical snow-globe: a plastic Taisho-era time capsule. The men in my family, myself included, sport moustaches because the ojii-san in the hand-tinted photographs wore the same. —Put us in stiff suits with starched shirts, and we could hang on the wall in a frame right next to them. Where we live, Boys’ Day is still Boys’ Day, not Children’s Day, and our poor man’s substitute for the unagi in makizushi is flaked canned tuna steeped in soy sauce and sugar. Sushi for our family came rolled in wax paper and was a picnic food long before it became the quintessential gourmet experience of the 80s.

After years of The Professor’s urging me to visit Osaka, I relented. In March of 2023 I would visit Japan for the first time since childhood.

Ostensibly, the purpose of this trip was to catch the Grand Sumo Haru Basho at the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium. I am an avid follower of the Makuuchi and Juryo divisions. I was a high school and college wrestler and even did Greco-Roman in the off seasons, which gave me an abiding appreciation for yotsu-zumo. I love an artfully executed throw. This is probably why my favorite rikishi are from Mongolia. Those wrestlers excel at putting their opponents to the clay with leverage rather than with a barrage of slaps and thrusts. Yotsu-zumo is timing and prowess. Yotsu-zumo is elegance. Yotsu-zumo is a good reason to finally go to Japan.

The Professor, also a fan of sumo, would nonetheless require my eight-day experience in the Kansai region to be one that also appealed to my inner historian. It would be unfair to say I was averse to the idea. I was, however, hoping to soak up some culture in Kyoto without breaking a sweat, but there it was:

Temples.

I got on a plane. The Professor greeted me outside the baggage claim, and Osaka commenced. I spent wonderful, frenetic days surrendering to my obsessions: sumo, okonomiyaki, whisky (mostly in the form of highballs, a refreshing revelation), sentō bath houses. Forget Paris: Hemingway’s Moveable Feast was in walking distance of my Nipponbashi business hotel.

Day Six was Kyoto Day. Kyoto Station was a hive of glass with spooky stairs leading to a quick lunch in a claustrophobic ramen court, where I was introduced to the pleasures of the chicken-based stock of the Old Capital. After a harrowing descent down to street level, The Professor and I got into a temple-bound cab..

At this point, I’ll mention my Kansai “costume.” It is with no small amount of embarrassment that I say that Americans are the worst dressed of all international travelers: yoga pants in the temple, knockoff NBA jerseys and shorts in the cocktail bar. I had arrived in early spring, when the first sakura blossoms tinted the landscape a delicate pink. Considering the weather, I bucked the casual choices of my sartorially-challenged countrymen and sported a blue Brooks Brothers blazer, button-down shirt and khakis.

This conservative get-up had an unexpected consequence: I was addressed in Japanese. Only at my sheepish request for “Eigo dake” did it dawn on people I was actually— gasp— an American. This had never happened to me among Japanese people before. Though I have a Japanese face, I stand five feet ten inches tall, and weigh in at 210 pounds. While not very large by American standards, at the Osaka Prefectural Gymnasium, I was the largest person in the arena not on the dohyō.

This mistaken nationality was a novelty for me, a unique vantage point: I could observe other visitors in the guise of a local. Both the Japanese and my fellow foreigners assumed I was part of the indigenous human landscape, albeit an oversized part. All it took was a shirt with a collar and long pants.

The Professor had played up Kiyomizu-dera as THE Kyoto temple. Let’s go! He showed me images of the famous terrace on his phone while we were in the cab. Breathtaking. I could hardly wait.

Then the cab came to a halt. The street leading uphill to the temple was choked with tourists thrashing upward like salmon. The Professor told our driver not to try to negotiate the crowded thoroughfare. We paid him and got out.

We found ourselves surrounded by a, flapping mob, honking like geese and holding their positions in a river of humanity. Some broke off to flow into the shops lining the street, but the main push was upward toward Kiyomizu-dera. Most did not look Japanese: gaunt Europeans in Birkenstocks and walking shorts, florid Australians in striped shirts and wide-brimmed bush hats, Chinese and French women in rented kimono. And the Americans. Yikes. Come on, America. I watched the spectacle from the sidelines, quietly marching along the edges as an incognito tourist.

What I saw was overtourism.

This is a new term which surfaced about five years ago. Kyoto is plagued by overtourism. In Hawai‘i, we understand the concept all too well. It’s an economic blessing which comes with a lifestyle curse. Our problem—as with Kyoto’s, I imagine—started with the rise of social media and the proliferation of cheap lodging. Regular folks in suburbs outside of Waikiki started converting their homes into Airbnb rentals. They put their overpriced property to work raising extra cash to take some of the sting out of the high cost of living on the most isolated islands on the globe.

The result of the lower-than-Waikiki nightly rates was the arrival of a new class of visitor. Gone were the middleaged couples in matching floral-print attire guzzling overpriced drinks garnished with tiny paper umbrellas. Sure, they were boisterous and tacky, but in a goofy, endearing way. They’ve been replaced by Instagram jockeys: younger, louder, and hell-bent on finding something “off the beaten path.”

This creature was everywhere at Kiyomizu-dera. We fought our way uphill until we reached a ticket booth. Once inside, though, the press of people was just as dense as it was on the street. The gloomy weather exacerbated the problem: not only were we squashed up against strangers, we were buffeted by clear plastic 500-yen konbini umbrellas. Only the shield of my own umbrella saved me from being jabbed in the eye. I couldn’t get within five feet of the terrace railing so I can’t comment on the famous view.When we cleared the terrace and could observe from a different vantage point, it looked as if it might collapse with the sheer weight of the crowd.

The Professor and I stopped in a shop downhill to try something of a Kyoto phenomenon: matcha soft serve cones. I couldn’t help thinking that my cone might benefit from a cheap chocolate-dipped shell.

We finished our cones on a blessedly empty Nene Road and took in some of the adjacent shrines and gardens, mostly deserted and peaceful. Without the crowds, everything was just nicer. Even the stray tourist in her garish Taisho-print kimono took on a charming air when it was just her, contemplating an early display of sakura without her phone out..

Not without trepidation, we next took a cab to Sanjusangendo Temple. At 120 meters long, it lays claim to being the world’s longest wooden building, housing 1,001 statues of Kannon. The Professor believed that the sight would leave me awe-inspired.

This time he was correct.

The “No Photography!” signs made the difference. No Instagrammers. No thrill seekers. There were only a handful of visitors, all of whom behaved as respectfully as one would expect in a temple.

The Professor and I drifted down the path in the main hall, taking in the detail on each intricately-wrought Kannon, comparing one statue to the next.All carved from cedar and covered in gold leaf faded with age, they appear identical at first glance. However, small details reveal their individual characters— whether it's the slight angle of a half-smile or the intricate miniature mandalas that crown each shining head.

I recalled the Buddhist sermons of my impatient childhood, mumbled in the broken English of the Honolulu Hongan-ji priests.Their meaning started to come into focus. Impermanence was personified in the slight changes in each passing statue I examined.

I was so reflective I frightened myself: had I grown up at last?

Sanjūsangendō was transformative.

Temples.

On the train ride back to Osaka, The Professor and I discussed our day. He told me he knows what I like. I believe he was saying I appreciate Kyoto in a unique way—as the Nikkei descendant of plantation labor immigrants from the provinces, with a taste for the understated yet uniquely American in my interpretation of the experience. All in the garb of an Ivy League Department Chair hung over a linebacker’s frame.

I’ll be back.

Next time, though, we sit and drink.

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