Arrived at our Kyoto digs late in the afternoon. Out to walk the crowded (so many westerners!)streets. First objective: relocating a favourite vegan cafe.

The writer Pico Iyer said this of Kyoto:

“I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.
The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.”

—- Pico Iyer

Tonight, the quiet spaces have been squelched. There is noise and movement and a jostling, tribal energy. The narrower streets of the famous Pontocho dining area, that follows the bank of the Kamogawa River, are lit with paper lanterns and iPhone screens.

Conversations swirl on the air like stirred ramen. A untranslatable broth of Dutch and Swiss and German and Italian and Israeli and some middle eastern dialects. And like dumplings bobbing up here and there, American.

I stand watching a busker. A robed Japanese girl with long black hair squats on the ground playing drums on a collection of inverted pots and aluminium pie trays. She is good. Really good. And the performance slowly crescendoes to a rhythmic, blurred, standing frenzy and thence to an orgasm of wild black hair and flying pie trays.

No. This is not Pico’s Kyoto.