by Steve Alpert

The secret back way to Kiyomizu-dera begins on Shichi-jo Dori. It’s a secret now because the city of Kyoto over the last thousand or so years has grown up around it. Back in the Heian Period (794-1185), and maybe a little after that, it would have been how you got to Kiyomizu from the old Imperial Palace just south of what later became Nijo Castle. A visit to Kiyomizu was a popular outing for Imperial concubines of the day.

You won’t find the secret back way to Kiyomizu-dera on any map. And it’s changed a little since I first walked it in 1975. I heard about this route from a British friend of mine named Ian. Ian was doing post-grad work in sculpture at Kyoto Bidai, Kyoto Bijutsu Daigaku, Kyoto’s (then) premiere college of the arts. He had a generous grant from Monbusho, Japan’s Ministry of Education.

Ian had graduated from a prestigious university in England with a degree in Studio Art. While facing the problem of what exactly a person could practically do with a degree in Studio Art, Ian had heard that Monbusho was giving money to artists with undergraduate degrees to pursue their careers in Japan. There were quotas for each country. English-speakers were favored, either because of the relative ease of communication, or as a back-handed way of getting more English teachers into the country. The quota for Americans was vastly over-subscribed. British applicants were few. Canadian and Australian applicants were fewer. Ian applied for a two-year fellowship and was immediately accepted.

Ian spoke no Japanese, and learning the language was not a part of his official program. He rented a room in a Meiji-era gothic mansion just up the big hill where Shichi-jo crosses Higashi-oji across from Kyoto Joshi Daigaku, a college for women. That part of the road was lined with stately old three-story Western-style mansions that spoke of another era and of old money. The owners of the mansion, who also lived there, were two elderly, aristocratic, unmarried sisters. They maintained the house and lived in it as if the Meiji era had never ended. Whenever I visited Ian there, they offered us tea, and real tea cakes or scones to go with it.

Ian used some of his generous grant money from Mumbusho to pay for nude models, even though his work didn’t involve the human figure at all. Sketching models was how he met women. The elaborate sculptures that Ian made were crafted from the pieces of plastic model kits of the kind you used to only be able to find in Japan. Gundam, Transformers, and characters from Japanese manga. Sometimes he also used pieces from model kits for cars, battleships, planes and tanks. He would dump out the pieces from the various kits, scatter them on the floor of his room, and then select the bits and pieces he needed to glue together to make original works of art. 

The room Ian occupied in the mansion took up most of the third floor. The bedroom part of it was in a back turret of the house and looked out over the city to the west and north, and up towards Higashiyama to the north and east. He could see part of Kiyomizu from his window, which is how he discovered the back route. He thought that if he could see it, he should be able to walk there, and so he explored, eventually finding the hidden route. And one day he showed it to me.

In later years, as a visitor to Kyoto and not a resident, I liked to start my journey along the secret back route with a visit to the National Art Museum or to the Sanjusangen-do across the street, or to both. The Buddhist statues in the National Art Museum are the very best. A monk in a small temple somewhere near Otsu once ruefully explained to me that back in the 1950s and 1960s the Japanese government had people going around to various small Kyoto temples offering to clean and restore their statuary. Then they would refuse to return the best ones, on the grounds that the small temples lacked the resources or the ability to care for and preserve them properly. The National Museums in Tokyo and Kyoto, they said, did.

Kiyomizu-dera famously refused to turn anything over to be cleaned or restored. The government officials then begged them to at least replace the originals, the centuries-old objects that were out and on display, with replicas. Kiyomizu again refused. These, the temple said, were gifts from worshipers and were meant to be seen. If they deteriorated with age, so be it. Material possessions were not meant to last forever. Nothing in this world is. That was the temple’s position. Even though the continued existence of Kiyomizu-dera itself (established in 778, completed in 1633) is the exception that disproves the rule.

Sanjusangen-do across the street from the National Art Museum appears to have kept all its statues. The inside of the temple has the ambiance of a warehouse for Buddhist statues. The unusually long back veranda is famous as the site of archery contests in Heian Japan, the subject of scroll paintings across the street at the National Art Museum. 

The back route to Kiyomizu begins by crossing Higashi-oji and climbing steeply uphill past Kyoto Joshi Daigaku. Kyoto Joshi Daigaku in the 1970s was a place where you could reliably see women going about campus who had never set foot on a tennis court carrying tennis rackets as fashion accessories. That was a thing for certain women back then. One of those mysterious Japanese fashion concepts that catch on and then go viral. Fashion was apparently important to the women who attended Kyoto Joshidai. Whenever I visited my friend Ian, or walked the back rout to Kiyomizu, I always paused to admire the lovely Joshidai college girls strolling the campus looking lovely, or playing volleyball around the corner in their abbreviated sports uniforms. 

Between the campuses of Joshidai and Kyoto Bidai there was a classic kissaten that used to be there, but is now gone. It was one of the places Ian used to post ads for models, and for the English conversation classes he taught, also to meet women. The food there was truly terrible and the excellent coffee they made took forever to brew. The décor was eclectic but the Classical music, and the speaker system that played it, was first rate. You could stake out a spot there and sit reading and sipping coffee forever. Probably why they eventually went out of business.

A little further up the hill is a large formal Shinto shrine. It’s a shrine that would probably be famous anywhere except Kyoto, where impressive shrines like this are in oversupply. Past the stone steps that lead up to the shrine, and just to the left, a dirt path heads down into a valley. It passes the fenced-in courts where the Joshidai girls played volleyball.

At the bottom of the hill you come to a paved road. Here you hop over a low metal divider and cross the road. Houses have been built on the other side of the road at some point since the twelfth century. New ones, anyway. Here, for maybe a few hundred yards, the path disappears and you have to go through the back yard of a house with a barking dog chained to a post. The dog, aroused from a nap and its dog dreams, would growl with conviction, snarl, and strain at its chains, eager for the attack. Over the years not much has changed here. The dog is still there. Or one of his offspring.

Past the houses, you cross another street and rejoin the path between a photography studio and a hair salon. The path drops into a thick stand of woods surrounding an old hand-pumped well. You come to a very long cement tunnel. The tunnel goes under the four-lane expressway from Gojo to Yamashina. Large luminous yellow signs inside the long, dark tunnel warn passers-by to beware of pickpockets. 

I always looked around and wondered what kind of pickpockets would be working a tunnel that almost no one ever uses. With the lack of pedestrian traffic, it didn’t seem to be worth a pickpocket’s time to lay in wait for victims. But if nothing else, the Japanese police are thorough, and the warning signs added an unreasonable twinge of danger to the long, dark passageway. The acoustics in there were great, and I sometimes played my shakuhachi in the tunnel. There was never anyone else around. 

Out of the tunnel and into the sunlight, the path climbs precipitously up a set of nearly vertical steps embedded into a concrete embankment. From the top of the steps there’s a nice view south and west back towards the center of Kyoto. The roofs of the massive Higashi Hongan-ji and Nishi Hongan-ji loom over the landscape. These had once been a single temple some thousand years ago. The temple had grown so large and so powerful that Japan’s secular rulers decided it needed to be cut in half. A boon for modern real estate dealers and urban planners, as it turned out.

The massive concrete embankment with the steep steps imbedded into it is adjacent to Kyoto’s largest cemetery. Every August at Obon, thousands of people spend the night there among the graves with glowing paper lanterns. They’re there to welcome their ancestors’ spirits back for their annual return, after first having spent time at sunset along the Kamogawa watching for the 大and other kanji characters to be lit by bonfires in the surrounding mountains.

At the very top of the concrete steps, the trail resumes and passes through a much older cemetery. The ground there is dirt and not concrete, and the grave markers are very old, very worn, and very faded. At the back of the small cemetery is an unpaved mountain road. The road is bordered on one side by a steep drop into a ravine full of very large pine and cedar trees, and on the other by the up-slope of the hillside from which it had been carved. 

Ten minutes down the dirt road you reach a small parking lot. Probably made for people having business with the Kiyomizu-dera. Skilled workmen doing repairs perhaps. Or government officials trying to talk the temple out of its statues. In my student days living in Kyoto, you could stroll unimpeded from the parking lot into the temple grounds. But on my first visit to Kiyomizu by the back way in the 1980s when I was living in Tokyo, I arrived at the parking lot and discovered metal gates and fences topped with barbed wire preventing entry into the temple complex. But there was a smaller gate embedded in the larger gate. It looked locked, but whenever I visited it never was. 

You didn’t see anything of note once you got through the gate. A dirt service road descended into a valley. A dirt path led up towards an unremarkable small sub-temple that was not particularly old. Just past that small temple is a small pagoda, one of the oldest wooden structures in Japan. You didn’t have to read the metal plaque posted next to it to realize that this was something special. It was your first real indication that you had entered the temple grounds. When I lived in Kyoto, you could walk up to the pagoda, sit on its steps and eat your lunch there. Now it’s protected by an iron fence topped with barbed wire.

Just past the pagoda and around a bend is the money view. For a first-time visitor who you’d made trudge all this way with you, without having explained where we were going, it would be a nice surprise. Even if you knew the temple but you’d never come this way before, it’s a nice surprise. Suddenly, there across a narrow, densely-wooded ravine, sits Kiyomizu-dera, spread out across a high ridge in all its iconic glory. And laid out just below it is the city of Kyoto shimmering seductively in the distance. The immense old temples in the old city center, Nishi Hongan-ji and Higashi Hongan-ji, look from up here like a pair of giant wooden ships on a calm sea. The silvery Kamogawa snakes its way through the landscape on the valley floor. Green mountains on three sides rise up in the distance. From here you can easily see why some twelve-hundred years ago someone thought it would be a great place to put a city.

The jewel in the view is the famous part of Kiyomizu with its great cantilevered deck, its double-wing side roofs, its massive hump-back-mountain center roof, its trailing gaggle of outbuildings, and a tall pagoda, freshly painted orange. All of it seems to float above the treetops, managing to appear weightless and heavy at the same time. Which really is the essence of Kiyomizu-dera. Weightless as a pleasure site for tourists. Heavy as a practicing Buddhist temple. Not to mention its spiritual and mystical connection to the land on which it sits. For centuries people have been coming here to stand on its deck and gaze back at the city below, and also to drink or to be blessed by its waters, which are said to have special healing powers. 

When I first saw Kiyomizu from here, its pagoda had not been repainted orange. It still had the wabi-sabi faded wood appearance that foreigners and some Japanese mistakenly believe was its original coloring. I always thought it looked better that way, unpainted. More suited to an outlier that had somehow survived centuries of world change. But science and modern ideas about authenticity have prevailed, and what are said to be the original colors have been restored to show how the temple was intended to look when it was originally built. Something like the way an expensive surgical face-lift is thought to make a much older person look more as nature had intended. Buddhist temples when first constructed were vibrantly colored. Gaudy, some might say. The wabi-sabi thing was apparently a later concept. 

If you’ve come by the secret back route, you’re approaching Kiyomizu by the best, and probably the originally intended way to encounter the temple. You first see it appear unexpectedly out of the mountain scenery. And then as you descend the path to reach it, it disappears from view completely. A path drops down into a deep, densely-wooded ravine. Along the way you encounter several impressively large slabs of rock with words of Buddhistic wisdom etched into the stone. These seem to serve as reminders to the visitor of the spiritual nature of the precincts you have entered, as does the small Inari Jinja, a Shinto shrine, tucked away in a corner. I’m always surprised to see a Shinto shrine on the grounds of a Buddhist temple. But then, when it comes to spiritual matters, the Japanese have always been big on hedging their bets.  

When you come by the back way, what you see and experience is the temple itself. You encounter the temple having avoided the touristic and commercial side of things. What most people now think of as the main entrance to the temple has become a street lined with souvenir shops selling trinkets, pottery and local sweets. You have to wonder if the monks who run the temple have somehow been clever about embracing the commercial realities of maintaining an old temple like this while somehow having preserved a secret back side for those who genuinely wish to worship. Or was it just a simple accident of geography? The back side being too steep and craggy for buildings and too hard to get to from modern Kyoto?

The back side of the temple also has the water. The Kiyomizu of the temple’s name. Coming in from the back way you drop down almost to the valley floor where a modest but sometimes vigorous waterfall feeds a burbling stream. From here you suddenly see the temple again, now looming high above you. Just before you reach it and just to the side of the massive flight of stone steps leading up to the temple, you come to a kind stone plaza. Jutting out from a carved stone roof that looks like part of a Japanese castle wall, and that’s built right into the side of the mountain, are three stone spouts spilling water into a shallow square pond with carved stone sides and paved with large stone tiles. 

The stone spouts are supported by carved stone pillars and a carved stone yoke. Under each stream that spills into the pond is a trio of raised stone pedestals, one square and two round. These are positioned so that supplicants can stand on them, allowing the clear waters of the temple to wash over them as they recite passages from a sutra or prayers. For centuries, pilgrims have come here to stand under the streaming water to be purified. When I used to visit Kiyomizu early in the morning before the temple’s official visiting hours, I sometimes saw pilgrims dressed in white, reciting sutras as the cold water poured down onto their heads. I either saw them in the formal pond on the stone pedestals, or at the bottom of the waterfall in the ravine just below, where the impact of the water was stronger and volume of the sutra being recited was louder.

These days, during the temple’s business hours, paying tourists with their cameras stand in line to get onto the stone terrace under the carved stone roof with the three streams of water. Back when I lived in Kyoto there were no lines. But the water ritual hasn’t changed much. Once under the stone roof you claim a metal cup attached to a long wooden handle. These used to just be lying about on a stone shelf, but now they’re cradled in a metal rack under a device that bathes them with ultraviolet rays for sterilization. You reach out with your long-handled cup to fill it with water from one of the three streams. Each stream is a liquid amulet, either for love, for knowledge or for health. The spouts are unlabeled and no one seems to know which is which. So you make your choice, fill your cup, drink the water, and guess which kind of good fortune you are about to receive. Whichever stream you choose, the water is clear, cool and delicious. Some say that once you’ve drunk the clear water of Kiyomizu-dera you will always come back. 

Your experience with the water complete, including possibly a selfie or souvenir picture, you head for the magnificent, steep, wide stone stairway that leads up to the main part of the famous temple, including its famous, spectacular cantilevered deck. On your left as you climb the steps is the elaborate forest of wooden supports that holds the deck up. Up there on the deck, hordes of tourists crowd its edges to take in the view of the city below. 

The view from the deck is even more magnificent than the one form across the valley (probably why they built the deck there and not across the valley). From the deck you can see the spot where you stood and first saw the temple. And you can also see the ancient pagoda that you passed on your way in (if you came by the back way), as if it were placed there on purpose to enhance the view from the deck. It just pokes out from a sea of trees, in various shades of green in some seasons, pink in others, or red, yellow and orange, and backed by a mist-shrouded mountain. The fence and the barbed wire that protect it, you don’t see from the deck.

Having saturated yourself with the view, you elbow your way through the crowd of tourists and head towards the front of the temple, where the paying visitors are still entering. If you had managed to sneak in before the temple officially opened, as I used to do, you could pause to breathe in the incense and listen to the monks inside the open front of the temple hall chanting their morning sutras. Otherwise, you won’t want to miss the little alcove where the Muromachi-era warrior Benkei’s big iron staff, small iron staff, and his iron geta are housed. These were said to be gifts to the temple from a blind blacksmith who had his sight restored by immersing himself in the temple’s waters below. Back in the day, the staffs and geta were simply left out and visitors were encouraged to handle them and to try to lift them. At some point the temple decided to chain them to an iron structure. Now no one can steal them, if they ever actually could. 

Trying to lift these objects allowed you to imagine how strong the famous warrior Benkei must have been. Amazing to think that he could have hefted this iron staff or walked in the iron geta, let alone fight someone wearing the geta or wielding the staff. The geta were a moderately easy lift. The smaller staff a little challenging. But Benkei’s big staff took all the strength I could muster to even get it to budge an inch or two. In all the times I visited the temple, I never saw anyone able to lift the staff. What a guy he must have been, that Benkei. And to think, Yoshitsune defeated him using only his fan on the bridge at Gojo.

When you finally leave Kiyomizu through the “front”, you walk down stone-paved streets smoothed over by centuries of visitors. Shops selling nama yatsuhashi, a confectionary pastry stuffed with sweet bean paste, make them on-site and provide free samples. With tea! Other stores sell the brightly-colored Kiyomizu-yaki pottery and a wide variety of cheap Kyoto souvenirs. The streets here are pedestrian-only almost all the way down to Maruyama Koen. Quiet in the late afternoon or early morning. Crammed with tourists most other times. 

There used to be shops along the way selling traditional crafts, but now it’s mostly tourist souvenirs and places offering to dress you up as a geisha to have your picture taken with a pagoda in the background. Along the way, there’s a branch of the wildly expensive but aesthetically serene Yudofu emporium Okutan, and near the bottom just before Maruyama Koen, a nice coffee shop with a small pond crammed full of big fat colorful koi.

Also towards the bottom, there are several very traditional places that don’t advertise exactly what kind of establishment they are. As if any kind of commercialism would sully or demean the artistry of what they do. A noren might indicate a restaurant or tea house. But not exactly what kind or how expensive it is. All so very Kyoto. Some of these are special kaiseki restaurants where lunch costs more than the round-trip shinkansen fare for two from Tokyo. Some are small exclusive ryokan not listed in any guidebook. Ryokan that, traditionally, specialize not in tourism, but in providing sophisticated Japanese-style venues for carrying on extramarital affairs or trysts. 

I still find the walk from Shichijo to Kiyomizu, and then on to Maruyama Koen, to be one of the very best ways to spend a day in Kyoto. You can extend your walk past the Chion-in with its giant Sanmon, past Yasaka Jinja with its stage for geisha performances, down Shijo-dori with its fancy shops, past Gion where the geisha live, over the bridge past the kabuki theater and the Kamogawa river, and on to the narrow Ponto-cho. At Ponto-cho you look out for the gayly and elaborately attired maiko who can sometimes be seen there. Then you step inside one of the wildly overpriced restaurants for dinner on a terrace overlooking the river, and as the sun begins to set and Mt. Hiei in the far distance begins to turn a charming shade of purple, you contemplate the flow of the river below and what it’s supposed to tell you about permanence. Has all of this changed since I was there last? I hope not. In a universe where the one constant is change (and the speed of light?), Kyoto has always been the exception that proves the rule.

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Steve Alpert gave up a career as an extra in Japanese B movies to work in Tokyo as a vice president for Citibank. He served as the president of Walt Disney TV Animation (Japan) and the head of international distribution for a Japanese animation company, Studio Ghibli. He has translated Japanese films and short works of Japanese fiction, and his book in Japanese about his experiences 吾輩は外人であるwas published in 2015 by Iwanami Shoten, and in English in 2020 as Sharing a House with the Never-Ending Man. Most recently, he is the author of Kyoto Stories published by Stonebridge Press in March 2022.