The Imperial Palace

Fridays I have, as I’ve doubtless noted before, only one class, which allows for a large amount of time-wasting, but today I actually did something educational. Usually the park-like area within the walls of the Imperial Palace complex is open to the public, but the inner gardens and buildings are surrounded by separate, alarmed walls that are too tall to see over. This weekend, however, people were allowed for free to walk through a designated path and see where the Emperor used to live. Unfortunately, there have been so many fires at various times that have destroyed different sections of the palace, and at times the whole thing, I believe, there are actually few buildings that date from before the 19th century. Even so, the buildings have, I believe, been rebuilt in the same styles that have been in use since the Heian period. It really was beautiful. The gardens alone were gorgeous, with carefully pruned pines and large ponds, and the various rooms had paintings that were from the great masters of various periods of history. I particularly like the Emperor’s Study room, where they used to hold big waka poetry contests with the large blinds open to the garden. After our tour through the Imperial Palace, we returned to the common room at school and loafed around for awhile before someone mentioned going out to an Indonesian restaurant that they’d heard of. It took us a little while to find it, but when we did it was both beautiful and delicious. It was called ‘Hati Hati’, and had many dishes with complex flavours, the best of which were the beef rendeng and the beef satay. One of my friends had, I learned, lived in Jakarta for seven years before returning to the US, and so was able to speak a little bit of one of the Indonesian dialects to the owner of the restaurant, who was very nice. It was a little more expensive than our usual fare, but not bad for the quality of food we got. After that, one of the other students was being thrown a surprise birthday party at a bowling alley close by, so I stuck around long enough to scare him along with the others as he came out of the elevator. As I’m not much of a bowler I headed out after that. When I got to my street, however, I noticed that it was cordoned off by policemen and trucks with red lights. I told the police officer that I lived just a bit down the road and he let me through, but on my way I saw what the problem had been: one of the houses in my neighbourhood had had a fire. I don’t know how or when it started, but once I drew close I could smell the unmistakable odour of charred, wet wood. When I reached the house itself my host mother was a bit worked up, and understandably so: fires have been extremely dangerous in Kyoto as long as there has been a Kyoto to catch fire. All of the buildings are made of wood and paper, and they are packed closely together with only narrow streets separating them except in modern areas where there are firebreak roads. This fire was far enough away from the fire to not even acquire much of the smell, but it was still rather startling.
-The Imperial Palace grounds have been in their present location since 1331. The palace described in The Tale of Genji and other contemporary literature was located 2km west of the current one and was built in 794.
-After a large fire in 1854 most all of the Palace had to be reconstructed.
-As you face the ‘throne room’-like building, there is a tachibana mandarin tree on the left and a cherry tree on the right, something that is often mimicked in different locations and gardens in Japan.
-The owner of the Indonesian restaurant seemed to speak fluent Japanese, English, and at least one dialect of Indonesian, maybe more.