Some trains and some culture

Kyoto and Osaka almost go hand in hand – if you go to one, there’s a good chance you’ll visit the other. Ashley and I had spent a couple days there on our last visit to the area years ago, and I wanted to take Miles to show him some of the beautiful temple and shrine complexes Kyoto is known for – and which I remember fondly. I knew I couldn’t jam pack the day’s itinerary with cultural and religious sites, though, given both his physical and attention span limits, so I set aside the morning for the Kyoto Railway Museum to “fill him up” before visiting two iconic locations in the afternoon. I think it worked out pretty well.

Kyoto Railway Museum

The Kyoto Railway Museum is a massive complex that houses both the former Umekoji Steam Locomotive Museum and exhibits from the now defunct Modern Transportation Museum in Osaka. Here you can wander through train yards full of decommissioned locomotives, drive toy trains through a giant diorama landscape, study public transport maps, operate a train crossing, learn how train engines work, and so much more. Miles went to the Denbus Train and Bus Museum in Kawasaki a year ago and loved it, but this museum is on another level completely. After a whole morning of running around from floor to floor we grabbed lunch in the museum cafe, and Miles said it had the best view of any restaurant. Our table was right up against the window overlooking a nearby set of tracks, and we kept tabs on each regular passenger train and sleek Shinkansen that passed us by.

Kiyomizudera

After lunch we took a car over to the Higashiyama part of town, nestled up against the mountains that form the eastern edge of Kyoto. This is where a lot of the historic districts of the city are to be found, including the narrow laneways that lead to Kiyomizudera. The 8th Century Buddhist complex and its large veranda overlooking the forested hillsides and the city below should be recognisable to anybody who grew up consuming Japanese pop culture (me), and it remains a popular mainstay of the Kyoto tourist circuit – the dense crowds surrounding us as we made our way up the hill was testament to that. Miles and I retraced the steps that Ashley and I took eight years ago, taking in the views from the veranda in front of the main Hondo Hall, and the views of the veranda from the nearby Okuno-in Hall, which I do prefer. From there we walked back out to the Sai-mon, or West Gate, and looked out over Kyoto until it disappeared into the Arashiyama hills on the other side of the city.

Fushimi Inari Taisha (and the rest of it)

Next up, the 10,000 torii gates of Fushimi Inari Taisha, the head shrine of the Japanese deity of foxes, among other things. This is another very popular stop on the Kyoto circuit, and the crowds here were perhaps even more stifling than at Kiyomizudera. Most were only there to get a first glance at the gates though, and after about 10 minutes of walking up the hill, underneath red gates donated by thousands of businesses over the last few centuries, we found ourselves basically on our own. Miles was keen to follow the path, asking questions about the different gates and shrines marking out our route, and we definitely went a lot further into the hills compared to the last time I was here with Ashley. I was quite impressed by the amount of energy he had that afternoon, though by the time we made our way back to the entrance I could tell he was feeling a bit fatigued. From there we headed back north to walk around the Gion district for a bit. I thought Miles would get a kick out of seeing some of the older neighbourhood scenes of Kyoto, but by that point he was pretty done with everything. We did a quick loop and then grabbed a pretty excellent matcha soft serve ice cream to enjoy while we walked back to the station to catch the next train back to Osaka.

Back to Osaka

The day went about as well as I could have hoped for. We managed to squeeze in some quality time at the train museum while also hitting up two of Kyoto’s key cultural sites. I had previously considered starting our day much earlier so we could also go to the bamboo groves at Arashiyama, but decided against it so as to conserve Miles’ energy. That turned out to be the right move as his energy petered out right as we were exiting Fushimi Inari Taisha. I think having a day like this in Kyoto worked out quite well compared to the day trip we took together to Nikko last October, where he was a year younger and there wasn’t really much for him to see in terms of his own interests. While walking temples and shrines still probably isn’t his idea of a fun time, he was old enough this year to still be interested enough to want to walk around and explore and ask questions, and my hope is that these kinds of exposures to the different rhythms and beliefs and ways of thinking inform his own reflections on who he is as a person and a citizen of the world.