The impression one gets when coming to Kyoto is that there is something slightly different about this city that you cannot find in New York or DC. For one, none of the buildings are very tall, and the taller they are, the more amazed you are about the variety of experiences promised within. A two-story building will have a Haagen-Dazs on the bottom and a Belgian waffle cafe on the top. An eight-story building will have a bookstore, a Muji, two kinds of cafes, three kinds of small clothing stores, and so forth... and that's only the two buildings on Kawaramachi-doori I happened to visit today. Walk into the side streets and you will discover 10x10 grids devoted to building directories; walk into an alleyway and be utterly mystified by the unadvertised hair salon.
Why exactly is this city built this way? Is it bad city planning? Are Japanese people too shy to arrange things in a more orderly way? It is as if it is all set up for a "consumer" on foot, with few offices and many storefronts, but stores are not arranged in an easy mall-like fashion and there is no information on what you are expected to consume-- sometimes the entire explanation is limited to "Bar", and sometimes there is just an enigmatic name like "Momo" with no explanation of what exactly you can find there.
But this is how it is meant to be in Kyoto, and I realized today what that means.
On Monday I stumbled across a cafe called Popopare Publico near the Book Off. It had one of the most attractive facades I've seen in Kyoto. Well, it's not attractive in the usual way, but the more I stayed there, the more it intrigued me-- and put butterflies in my stomach (in Japanese, どきどき) at the concept of going in.
There is something about this storefront that simultaneously attracts and repels me. It is not new, or fresh, nor does it have that sort of finished look that makes you think it is a store. In fact, if you zoom in a little you will see the art is oddly amateurish and captioned with copyright symbols and one feels that perhaps it is not meant to be a real cafe but someone's poor imitation. Yet at the same time the amateurishness is appealing in its own way. It makes the cafe seem more human and less a robotic attempt at perfection, and this is confirmed by the architecture, which is insistent that it is not trying to be made out of brick and stucco, but rather remind you of the pleasant look of brick and stucco. A chain cafe, or "professional" cafe, would not have a real mailbox out front. That sort of thing is strictly forbidden, and to a lesser extent the gas pipes are as well. But to me the mailbox, like the drawings, is an thing insignificant in itself that gives the facade on the whole the assertion of reality.
Yeah, you tell me I'm overthinking this, but clearly a lot of effort was put into this storefront.
Now, the main reason I ended up just staring at this facade for an hour on Monday without going in was a strong intuition that the food would be expensive, and I would be required to talk with the owner in Japanese. You don't really need to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out that the food here is expensive, because the only price listed anywhere outside is $4.50 for coffee or tea, and there is no menu except for a tantalizing promise of "COFFEE, TEA, CAKE, WAFFLE, SANDWITCH, etc." on a card stuck to the windowpane. As for the latter hunch, I stared inside the window, which is not very polite, but it didn't matter because there was nobody behind the counter and all the tables were empty. Nobody seems to come here, and the profusion of placards on the door speaks to a single owner who does not speak English; therefore, the possibility of being forced to make conversation in Japanese loomed over my head.
Ultimately I went to Falafel Garden instead on Monday, and it was delicious and relaxing in the way that all good Kyoto cafes are, but the bizarre name, facade, and pencil drawings of Popopare Publico haunted my thoughts like Lovecraft's cephalopodic anthropoid. So, I returned today, paced around the entrance, summoned up all my courage and went in.
I felt very nervous walking inside, and the Japanese woman who appeared from the back looked quite surprised to see a gaikokujin in her cafe. She was older than I expected, and her glasses enlarged her eyes in a way I had only heard of before in books. I sat down, examined the menu which mostly consisted of rare teas for $6 and sweets for $7-12, and ordered what looked like the most unique item: a waffle with fruit. I still felt strangely like I didn't belong here, mainly because, as I had expected, the food was twice the price of any other cafe and I was the only one there.
"Don't you want the set?" she asked in Japanese. I could save $3 on tea that way, but I was a cheapskate to the heart. "No, just the waffle."
I wasn't sure about the etiquette for being the only person in a restaurant that is almost always empty and having the sole employee making food for you, so I sat quietly and read my Zen book. To my surprise she put real maple syrup on the table. I wanted to compliment her on her taste, but I was still kind of nervous.
Finally the waffle arrived.
There is nothing particularly exciting about this waffle, as it was made with normal batter in a waffle iron, except for the fact that there are three kinds of fruit on it, the sliced apple is arranged with a clumsy grace, and there are sugar sprinkles on the apple slices.
"Is this a... European pear?" I asked her. I thought it was too delicious to be an apple!
"Sugar sprinkles...?"
"Uh, no, the fruit."
"It's an apple."
"Really!"
"Is there something wrong?"
"No... it's delicious!"
She smiled, and started to clean the waffle iron. "Where are you from?"
"America." I explained I was studying Buddhism at Ryukoku University, which surprised her. "I'm living in temples and doing zazen and stuff." We talked briefly about my study abroad and where I studied Japanese (I insisted I was not very good), and I said I had gone to Fukui-ken to see the temples there (I didn't know the word for "monk training").
"I was born in Fukui-ken!" she said.
"Really!" I said. We talked about something else that I forget, then she went to the back. Well, I didn't know enough to get to know her name, but I learned something neat.
When I was done I put my fork over my knife and called her. She was using her computer at the end of the hall. I paid up and she said something with unfamiliar words, but from the word nihonjin I got the gist of it-- she thought I was being as polite as a Japanese person! We both laughed, I thanked her for the meal, and I biked home grinning. Why was I grinning? I just paid $8 for a waffle. I thought about it and grinned even more.
On that ride I realized what it is about Kyoto that makes it so great. It is not a big city made by faceless corporations. It is, like Alpha's Yokohama, a city of people. Where it succeeds it is because someone created something personally, and executed it with love. It is not a dead city designed for the clueless tourist, but a living city made for someone who knows who it is they want to see, and whose idea of happiness they want to experience. I am glad that, as a foreigner with such a limited understanding of the language and culture, I got a little taste of that.
You can never see all of Kyoto. Everywhere you go, except for the temples and fast food establishments, it is not just about a place, but the people you see there. And those lives are constantly changing.
