So we came to the city of Kioto in regal sunshine, tempered by a breeze that drove the cherry blossoms in drifts about the streets. …look… a grey-black sea of house roofs, speckled with the white walls of the fire-proof godowns where merchants and rich men keep their chief treasures. The general level is broken by the temple roofs, which are turned up at the edges, and remotely resemble so many terai-hats. Kioto fills a plain almost entirely surrounded by wooded hills… Once upon a time it was the capital of Japan…
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We are… in the quaintest hotel that ever you saw. It stands on the hillside overlooking the whole town of Kioto, and its garden is veritable Japanese. Fantastically trimmed tea trees, junipers, dwarfed pine, and cherry, are mixed up with ponds of goldfish, stone lanterns, quaint rock-work, and velvety turf all at an angle of thirty-five degrees. Behind us the pines, red and black, cover the hill and run down in a long spur to the town. But an auctioneer’s catalogue cannot describe the charms of the place or deal justly with the tea-garden full of cherry trees that lies a hundred yards below the hotel…

I had been watching the afternoon sunlight upon the trees and the town, the shift and play of colour in the crowded street of the cherry, and crooning to myself because the sky was blue and I was alive beneath it with a pair of eyes in my head.

Immediately the sun went down behind the hills the air became bitterly cold, but the people in crêpe sashes and silk coats never ceased their sober frolicking. There was to be a great service in honour of the cherry blossom the next day at the chief temple of Kioto, and they were getting ready for it. As the light died in a wash of crimson, the last thing I saw was a frieze of three little Japanese babies with fuzzy top-knots and huge sashes trying to hang head downwards from a bamboo rail. They did it… The effect in silhouette was immense!
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Very early in the dawn, before the nesting sparrows were awake, there was a sound in the air which frightened me out of my virtuous sleep. It was a lisping mutter—very deep and entirely strange. “That’s an earthquake, and the hillside is beginning to slide,” quoth I, taking measures of defence. The sound repeated itself again and again, till I argued, that if it were the precursor of an earthquake, the affair had stuck half-way. At breakfast men said: “That was the great bell of Kioto just next door to the hotel a little way up the hillside…”

“So I fancied when I first heard it,” I said casually, and went out up the hill under sunshine that filled the heart and trees, that filled the eye with joy. You know the unadulterated pleasure of that first clear morning in the Hills when a month’s solid idleness lies before the loafer, and the scent of the deodars mixes with the scent of the meditative cigar. That was my portion when I stepped through the violet-studded long grass into forgotten little Japanese cemeteries—all broken pillars and lichened tablets—till I found, under a cut in the hillside, the big bell of Kioto—twenty feet of green bronze hung inside a fantastically roofed shed of wooden beams. … At one side, guyed by half a dozen small hawsers, hung a battering-ram, a twelve-foot spar bound with iron, its nose pointing full-butt at a chrysanthemum in high relief on the belly of the bell. … Half a dozen men swung the ram back and forth with shoutings and outcries, till it had gathered sufficient way, and the loosened ropes let it hurl itself against the chrysanthemum. … Many times since I have heard the bell speak when I was far off. It says B-r-r-r very deep down in its throat, but when you have once caught the noise you will never forget it…

From its house a staircase of cut stone takes you down to the temple of Chion-in, where I arrived on Easter Sunday just before service, and in time to see the procession of the Cherry Blossom. …The main front of the temple was three hundred feet long, a hundred feet deep, and sixty feet high. One roof covered it all, and saving for the tiles there was no stone in the structure; nothing but wood three hundred years old, as hard as iron. The pillars that upheld the roof… showed the natural grain of the wood till they were lost in the rich brown darkness far overhead. The cross-beams were of grained wood of great richness; cedar-wood and camphor-wood and the hearts of gigantic pine had been put under requisition for the great work. One carpenter—they call him only a carpenter—had designed the whole, and his name is remembered to this day. A half of the temple was railed off for the congregation by a two-foot railing, over which silks of ancient device had been thrown. …I remember… row upon row of little lacquered stands each holding a rolled volume of sacred writings; an altar as tall as a cathedral organ where gold strove with colour, colour with lacquer, and lacquer with inlay, and candles such as Holy Mother Church uses only on her greatest days, shed a yellow light that softened all. Bronze incense-burners in the likeness of dragons and devils fumed under the shadow of silken banners, behind which, wood tracery, as delicate as frost on a window-pane, climbed to the ridge-pole. Only there was no visible roof to this temple. The light faded away under the monstrous beams, and we might have been in a cave a hundred fathoms below the earth but for the sunshine and blue sky at the portals where the little children squabbled and shouted.

…I went round the temple verandah to what we must call a vestry at the back… It was a big building connected with the main one by a wooden bridge of deepest time-worn brown. Down the bridge ran a line of saffron-coloured matting, and down the matting, very slowly and solemnly, as befitted their high office, filed three and fifty priests, each one clad in at least four garments of brocade, crêpe, and silk. There were silks that do not see the light of the markets, and brocades that only temple wardrobes know.

There was sea-green watered silk with golden dragons; terra-cotta crêpe with ivory-white chrysanthemums clustering upon it; black-barred silk shot with yellow flames; lapis-lazuli silk and silver fishes; avanturine silk with plaques of grey-green let in; cloth of gold over dragon’s blood; and saffron and brown silk stiff as a board with embroidery. We returned to the temple now filled with the gorgeous robes. The little lacquer stands were the priests’ book-racks. Some lay down among them, while others moved very softly about the golden altars and the incense-burners; and the high priest disposed himself, with his back to the congregation, in a golden chair through which his robe winked like the shards of a tiger-beetle.
…
…the service drew to an end, and the candles burned low.

We went away to other parts of the temple pursued by the chorus of the devout till we were out of earshot in a paradise of screens. Two or three hundred years ago there lived a painterman of the name of Kano. Him the temple of Chion-in brought to beautify the walls of the rooms. Since a wall is a screen, and a screen is a wall, Kano… had rather a large job. But he was helped by pupils… and in the end left a few hundred screens which are all finished pictures. …Since the Emperor occasionally visited the place there was a room set apart for him of more than ordinary splendour. Twisted silk tassels of intricate design served in lieu of catches to pull back the sliding screens, and the woodwork was lacquered. …it is not in my grip to express the restfulness of it all, or the power that knew how to secure the desired effect with a turn of the wrist. The great Kano drew numbed pheasants huddled together on the snow-covered bough of a pine; or a peacock in his pride spreading his tail to delight his womenfolk; or a riot of chrysanthemums poured out of a vase; or the figures of toilworn countryfolk coming home from market; or a hunting scene at the foot of Fujiyama. The equally great carpenter who built the temple framed each picture with absolute precision under a ceiling that was a miracle of device, and Time, the greatest artist of the three, touched the gold so that it became amber, and the woodwork so that it grew dark honey-colour, and the shining surface of the lacquer so that it became deep and rich and semi-transparent…

Minor artists had worked with Kano the magnificent. These had been allowed to lay brush upon panels of wood in the outer verandahs, and very faithfully had they toiled. It was not till the guide called my attention to them that I discovered scores of sketches in monochrome low down on the verandah doors. An iris broken by the fall of a branch… a bamboo spray bowed before the wind that was ruffling a lake; a warrior of the past ambushing his enemy in a thicket, hand on sword, and mouth gathered into puckers of intensest concentration, were among the many notes that met my eye. How long, think you, would a sepia-drawing stand without defacement in the midst of our civilisation were it put on the bottom panel of a door, or the scantling of a kitchen passage? Yet in this gentle country a man may stoop down and write his name in the very dust, certain that, if the writing be craftily done, his children’s children will reverently let it stand.
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Japan is a great people. Her masons play with stone, her carpenters with wood, her smiths with iron, and her artists with life, death, and all the eye can take in.
…

We headed through the marvellous country straight across the plain on which Kioto stands, till we reached the range of hills on the far side…
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The river charged down a turn in the pine-grown hills, and broke in silver upon the timber and the remains of a light bridge washed away some days before. On our side, and arranged so as to face the fairest view of the young maples, stood a row of tea-houses and booths built over the stream. The sunlight that could not soften the gloom of the pines dwelt tenderly among the green of the maples and touched the reaches below where the cherry blossom broke in pink foam against the black-roofed houses of a village across the water.

There I stopped.