Your Stereotypical Kyoto Tour - Japan 2015 6/7

Don't get me wrong, Kyoto is an amazing city. With over 2,000 temples and 17 UNESCO heritage sites, there are endless places to visit. As well, because of its abundant amount of tourists, Kyoto is also extremely multilingual. There will be English pamphlets and signage, and most people you will ever need to deal with will speak English too. It is quaint and sophisticated, with elements of nature all around. Whether it's to shop in one of its huge department stores, to walk down a stone paved road behind tea houses, or sample the multitude of beautifully carved out dishes in a Kaiseki, Kyoto will capture the hearts of anyone looking to experience the Japan they see on TV.



But after waves and waves of one stereotypical Japanese looking building after another, and thousands of temples later, Kyoto remains, as beautiful as it is, a very tourist city. The geisha you see on the streets are usually tourists doing photo shoots, and almost all the ladies dressed in kimono that I saw spoke anything but Japanese. Like Kuta, like Bankok, who's culture has slowly been replaced with whatever the tourists wish to see, I wonder if Kyoto has morphed over the years, also, to uphold an image rather than real tradition.

I appreciated the opportunities to visit all the famous places, they make for impressive pictures, and would be the pictures you share to make your friends jealous of you experiencing this degree of exoticism. But I have nothing to present but those imagery. No serendipity with a new friend, no minor adversity we had to overcome, no challenges, and most important of all, no stories to tell. I had absolutely no feelings about Kyoto other than what it's packaged beauty imprinted on my eyes. There were skillful craftsmanship and a sickening amount of matcha products, but the entire time I was there, all I could hear was the voice in my head saying, "what else is there?".

Like attempting to fill a hollow void, I searched but came up empty. I so deeply wanted to feel something, but I couldn't hear a whisper. "Surely the next world renown temple must trigger something" I think to myself, only to end up lacking inspiration till the end. Perhaps it was the bus loads of tourists that made my Kyoto experience authentically non-Japanese, perhaps we simply did not allocate enough time to appreciate its history, or perhaps, I was looking for something that was never there in the first place.