Glimpse Into the Past

What this photograph doesn’t show you is the several hundred people I was holding the camera above. It’s a steep street in the middle of a food and shopping district at cherry blossom sunset, shot handheld and walking, because there was no version of that evening where anyone was setting up a tripod.

It was day four or so, our first day in Kyoto after starting the trip in Tokyo, and it did not land the way I expected. I’d assumed Tokyo would be a city I enjoyed and Kyoto would be the one that floored me — all the history and the iconography I’d loved from a distance for most of my life. The history is all there. So is a level of tourism I wasn’t ready for. Tokyo is a working city first; people on the street are going somewhere. In Kyoto it felt as though everyone was wandering, ourselves included, and that takes some of the magic out of it.

We found the quiet spots of Kyoto later in the trip, but not on day one.

The blossoms were half planning and half luck — my wife had been in Vietnam for work and met me in Japan on the way back, and the timing happened to land in peak bloom. We’d walked up into the old town, had a green tea ice cream, and this is what was waiting on the way down the hill.