Sure, you sometimes see women wrapped in kimonos. Like countless other Westerners, I've been lured to Kyoto by the magic of Arthur Golden's bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha . Its images of strange and grace-filled rituals, studied gardens and fanciful pavilions and rivalries among beauties in a temptingly taboo cosmos of desire and discretion proved irresistible. But the world they symbolise persists in lilting roofs and intricate gardens, on stages and in crafts shops and the rambling wooden inns of Kyoto, Japan's most traditional city. This is a modern metropolis with a swift underground metro and people scurrying everywhere.
Roadside vending machines sell beer, sodas, even liquor.
Bullet trains end their 150kmh journeys beneath the sweeping metallic arches of the ultra-modern depot. But, where Tokyo is a frenzied and lustful heavy-metal blue chord, Kyoto is a delicate, deliberate haiku in praise of things past. In traditional shopping districts, two-storey wooden buildings spill down sloping cobbled lanes lined with reedy weeping willows. Curved roofs and canopies shaped like arched eyebrows float atop monuments. Studied green spaces appear in front of inns, homes, tiny shrines and traditional cemeteries that are tucked between the borders of burgeoning neighborhoods.