Kyoto Report 2025 – 8

This Tuesday report will provide some insights into life for a westerner (me) who is working for an extended period at Kyoto University in Japan but who over the years of working here has increasingly began to understand the language and local cultural traditions.

Friday – tea break – where else?

Friday’s weather was again sunny and I took some time out in the early afternoon for a tea break at one of my favourite places in the north-west suburbs – the magnificent Imamiya Shrine which is one of the oldest Shinto shrines in Japan.

The whole area around there is a myriad of gardens, shrines, and lovely paths that make it a pleasure to journey out to.

And the gem is the two traditional Aburi-Mochi (rice cake) shops that abut the shrine entrance.

One of the shops is the oldest sweet shop – ‘Ichiwa’ – in Japan going back round 1,000 years and the next photo is taken from the outside.

Across the path is the second (I think they are both owned by the same person now) shop known as ‘Kazariya’ (600 years old) where I stopped for some ‘Aburi-Mochi’.

The rice cakes are coated with a roasted soybean powder and grilled over charcoal fire. The thumb-sized pieces are then basted with a sweet white soybean sauce.

Quite the treat.

Then it was back to work.

This article = Ichiwa Rice Cakes – provides more detail.

Disturbing exhibition

On Saturday, it was another beautiful late Autumn day in Kyoto and so we set off West on our bikes out to the famous Kitano Shopping District to visit the – Kyoto HBS Museum – or the Kyoto Butsuryu Museum, where an exhibition of photographs from the official US war-time photographer – Joe O’Donnell – was being held.

As an aside, the Kitano District is famous for its annual Ichijo Hyakki-yagyo [百鬼夜行] or Night Parade of One Hundred Demons at the Taishogum Shopping street or ‘Yōkai Street’ (street of supernatural monsters), which is held every October.

Local people including the local shop keepers and dedicated enthusiasts dress up as yōkai (妖怪] – which can take a number of forms – kappa, tengu, kitsune – and after dark they parade around the local streets.

The term 妖怪 is a sort of omnibus term that defines entities that are somewhere between humanity and the gods.

They are also quite distinct from the deities that Shinto and Buddhism recognises.

It is hard to actually nail down where the 妖怪 starts and ends and no-one really knows how many there are – but the story goes that there are hundreds if not thousands.

One such 妖怪] is the Yuurei [幽霊) which is close to what we would call a ghost because they are souls of the deceased who cannot escape the borders of confusion and hatred.

It is thought their death was violent.

An example is the character from the Koji Suzuki’s Ring novel series – Sadako Yamamura.

She is very scary.

It is a great festival and reenacts stories from thousands of years past about yōkai (supernatural monsters) and oni (demons/ogres) marching down the streets.

Anyway, that is not the reason I was in the area, which is in the Western area of Kyoto.

The Kyoto Butsuryu Museum was established to preserve the teachings of the Buddhist reformer monk – Nissen Shōnin – who became known as Seifu Nagamatsu.

He was born in 1817 and came from a family well grounded in the literary arts.

He became well-known in these circles as he matured and excelled in “calligraphy, painting, and poetry”.

He then became an expert in the – Lotus Sutra – “one of the most influential and venerated Buddhist Mahāyāna sūtras” and in 1848 took his monastic vows.

The Buddhist sects were unravelling around this time and rejected his presence.

So he became a sort of peoples’ monk focusing on the main principles of Buddhahood.

This became a major “doctrinal dispute” which I won’t go into here that led him to break away from the orthodox Buddhist community and founded the sect – Honmon Butsuryū Shū – which preserved the fundamental teachings that he had learned.

The Museum was opened in 2012 to continue his progressive teachings.

So it was apt that they held the exhibition – トランクの中の日本　戦争、平和、そして仏教 (Japan in a Trunk: War, Peace, and Buddhism) – which was a textual-visual display of the many photographs that Joe O’Donnell took when he became part of the occupying force once Japan was decimated by the atomic bombs in August 1945.

He entered Japan just 19 days after the Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9, 1945.

For the next seven months his job was to photograph the consequences of the attacks.

Some of this work was not approved officially and he smuggled the negatives out at the end of his mission.

He was so devastated by what he saw in those seven months that he hid the negatives in a trunk at his home and didn’t open it for nigh on 50 years.

In 1989, suffering from acute mental problems (depression etc) he reopened the trunk and the devastation he had witnessed first hand turned him into an anti-nuclear activist until he died in 2007.

He struggled with depression for the rest of his life but was able to publish the photos with very insightful and personal narrations.

Much of that publication was on display at the Museum in Kyoto.

Even after he planned to tour with the photos and material he met resistance from military types who continue to justify the unjustifiable violations of human rights that occurred in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.

The exhibition was shocking – profoundly disturbing.

I was always part of the anti-nuclear movement and the photos and narrative at the Museum were reminders of how war crimes can be so easily justified.

I was no fan of the Japanese aggression during that time.

But the slaughter of tens of thousands of innocent civilians include children was a shocking atrocity.

O’Donnell took the photo of – The Boy Standing by the Crematory – which is a chilling reminder of what was done by the Americans at that time.

The NHK World program – 焼き場に立つ少年’をさがして (Searching for the Standing Boy of Nagasaki) – which was broadcast on August 30, 2020 (available on-line until July 26, 2026) traces the attempts to identify the boy carrying his dead brother to the area in Nagasaki where the dead were unceremoniously cremated.

In that program, they determined that the photo that O’Donnell published was the mirror image (based on writing on the sign near the boy’s feet) and so the photo above is flipped to the correct orientation.

It took me a while after we left the museum to calm down again even though the weather outside was beautiful.

I actually rode my bike to the Imperial Garden and sat by the swings in the sun to reflect on what I had seen.

I often go to that spot to have a cheese and baguette for lunch on work days.

The UK Guardian editorial (November 17, 2025) – The Guardian view on a new nuclear age: great powers should not restock a house of dynamite – has some salient observations to make about the current state of the nuclear debate.

The problem is that humanity is essentially quite stupid and blinded by greed and ambition despite how smart we are.

深泥池

While Ichijo-dori (the street the march is held in) does not seem to have any mysterious hauntings or other things that might explain the 妖怪 association, on Sunday, I went to a haunted area in North Kyoto and was lucky to escape unscathed.

It was another gloriously sunny day in Kyoto and after a long run along the Kamo river, we set off on the subway out to Kitayama station in the north of Kyoto.

We decided not to ride our bikes because we were heading up into the mountains and across non-bike riding areas.

Our first destination was 深泥池 or Midorogaike Pond (Mizorogaike Pond) out in the far North-East of the Kita Ward.

Well actually it wasn’t.

First, we left the subway and immediately to our right on the northern side of the Botanical Gardens is the 京都府立陶板名画の庭 (Garden of Fine Arts Kyoto) which I will detail below.

After our visit to the Fine Arts Garden, we headed north to the area where the pond is.

By then the sun was quite warm.

The pond is an extensive natural wet land area and is amazing.

The local myth is that it is haunted and while visiting during the day is relatively safe, if one dares venture out at night one will be tied up and disappear forever.

We chose early afternoon to visit and stayed out of the shadows just in case we were tied up.

It was a beautifully tranquil place out on the urban fringe of north Kyoto and no tourists (other than us) were around this area.

In fact, while the areas in Kyoto south and around the station and shopping district (big emporium district) are massively overcrowded with tourists – and the local council is considering a 10,000 yen per night accommodation tax on top of the usual charges to deal with the tidal wave of loud-mouthed tourists – the areas in the north (Kita Ward, Sakyu Ward (top) and so on) are free of the mayhem.

This is where we live and head to when we are out and about.

Then to the Midorogaike Shinto Shrine – up the hill

Then we ambled up a hill to the Midorogaike Shrine, also which is a small shrine and a very peaceful location just to go to and sit and reflect.

That seems to happen a lot when I live in Kyoto.

There is nothing particular about the shrine but the woodwork is really nice and when we arrived there was no-one in sight (a bit later two locals arrived and went through their Shinto ritual).

Here are beautiful steps leading up to one of the devotion altars.

But there was some reconstruction work going on (stopped for the weekend) on one of the small buildings that make up the shrine.

We noticed all the tools on a bench that were just sitting there.

I reflected on what would happen if a trades person left their tools out over the weekend in a place where the public could visit unchecked.

You can guess my conclusion.

This is Japan and it is different and so different.

Then we passed some heartbreaking destruction

A growing trend in Kyoto (all over Japan in fact) is the destruction of old houses, often to create commercial car parking spaces, given that more Japanese people are driving cars and there is no space to put them.

The little and not so little Machiya town houses are falling by the day as the machinery moves in.

This year I have seen more of these demolition sites than in all the time I have been coming here.

After we left the Shrine, we went down hill again and across in the direction of the famous Ōta Shrine where the Iris wonder occurs in May and June each year.

Along the way, as we skirted along the ridge road, we encountered this.

Check out the beautiful wood joints and mortices in the beams and posts that the machine just hacked down.

If I was a billionaire I would buy as many of these little houses as I could to preserve them.

But alas!

Just after that site, we walked up a steep incline and along the top path to the Ōta Shrine.

The mountain trail was beautiful and quite and to our left was a large bamboo fencing all along the route.

The path view forward.

Looking back up the path.

We encountered three old and quite large townhouses built into the side of the escarpment with beautiful bamboo and other trees in the gardens that dropped down to the road below.

I thought when I saw the bamboo forest, who needs to go to Arashiyama and battle with the millions of tourists out there in west Kyoto (where the famous Bamboo Forest is).

We had this place all to ourselves.

The three houses were all abandoned and in varying states of disrepair.

We became instantly curious about their story.

I have been researching this question for some time now and there is a phenomenon where the owners die (ageing etc) and the relatives officially lodge a denial of their inheritance to avoid maintenance and taxes etc on the properties they do not want.

So the houses then deteriorate and fall apart.

The houses had glorious verandas facing south – so all the morning sun – and one had a really nice outhouse pavillion that I imagined would be a perfect working area.

I am now examining the land registry to determine their status.

I have a friend who works in a geo-spatial firm in Tokyo who is an expert of the cadastral system in Japan and I am catching up with her in Tokyo on Thursday and I will ask her to investigate ownership, status of registration etc.

It is possible the City had resumed ownership after an inheritance denial process or that the owners want to sell anyway (given they have abandoned the houses) and we could save one of them.

I had a meeting down in Kyoto central today with a company that specialises in saving these houses and on-selling them.

I gained quite a bit of information from them about the process, but didn’t tell them the specific location of the houses for fear they would gazump me.

An ongoing project!

It was quite a long walk and this post is getting long too so I will update our later visit to the Shrine and beyond in the next report.

To finish – it was lucky I wasn’t out shopping for some furniture at the weekend

Well, also, the fact that I was in Kyoto rather than Noshiro in the Akita Prefecture (NW Japan) some 865 kms away also helped.

The Japan Times article (November 17, 2025) – Bears attacks and sightings continue in northern Japan – reported that on Sunday around 11:20, a 80-centimetre, male bear wandered into the Aoen Shopping Centre (a big chain in Japan) and went up to the first floor to examine the furniture section.

It hung around for 2.5 hours while store staff barricaded it in with the display furniture.

He was eventually killed around 14:00.

The shopping centre is right in the heart of Noshiro.

Earlier police reported yet another death – an elderly women savaged in a rice field in the town of Kazuno, which is also in the Akita Prefecture.

We were going to go up into the Kiso Mountains for a day or two this week but cancelled the trip given the on-going and increasing sightings of bears.

We are just two weeks short of Winter here and it is getting quite cold but the bears haven’t yet stocked up enough it seems before hibernating.

Kill squads are being formed by the government but the people are scared that the training will be inadequate.

That is enough for today!

(c) Copyright 2025 William Mitchell. All Rights Reserved.