The Tea House On Mulberry Street

It was a dreamlike evening, quiet, a scene from an ink painting. Kyoto worked its magic. That magic had entranced pilgrims for centuries, and was celebrated in scrolls and screens, prints and pottery, songs and poetry. The haiku poet Basho sighed, «Even when in Kyoto, I long for Kyoto.» With its refined architecture shaped by the tea ceremony and the court nobility, and its many crafts of weaving, paper-making, lacquer, and others, Kyoto was regarded by people around the world as a cultural city on a par with Florence or Rome. In the last months of World War II, the U.S. military command decided to remove Kyoto from the air-raid list. Although Kyoto was a major population center of some strategic importance, the State Department argued that it was more than just a Japanese city-it was a treasure of the world. As a result, old Kyoto survived at the end of the war, a city of wooden houses, its streets lined with bamboo trellises. The first thing an arriving visitor saw as a train pulled in was the sweeping roof of Higashi Honganji Temple, like a great wave rising out of the sea of tiled roofs ...»