Kyoto Quotes

“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, Video Night in Kathmandu and Other Reports from the Not-So-Far East

“Along with the greening of May came the rain. Then the clouds disappeared and a soft pale lightness fell over the city, as if Kyoto had broken free of its tethers and lifted up toward the sun. The mornings were as dewy and verdant as a glass of iced green tea. The nights folded into pencil-gray darkness fragrant with white flowers. And everyone's mood seemed buoyant, happy, and carefree.
When I wasn't teaching or studying tea kaiseki, I would ride my secondhand pistachio-green bicycle to favorite places to capture the fleeting lushness of Kyoto in a sketchbook. With a small box of Niji oil pastels, I would draw things that Zen pots had long ago described in words and I did not want to forget: a pond of yellow iris near a small Buddhist temple; a granite urn in a forest of bamboo; and a blue creek reflecting the beauty of heaven, carrying away a summer snowfall of pink blossoms.
Sometimes, I would sit under the shade of a willow tree at the bottom of my street, doing nothing but listening to the call of cuckoos, while reading and munching on carrots and boiled egg halves smeared with mayonnaise and wrapped in crisp sheets of nori. Never before had such simple indulgences brought such immense pleasure.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“For [Stephen] Harper, a national daycare plan bordered on being a socialist scheme, a phrase he had once used to describe the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. For [Paul] Martin, whose plan would have transferred to the provinces $5 billion over five years, the national program was what Canadianism was all about. "Think about it this way," [Martin] said. "What if, decades ago, Tommy Douglas and my father and Lester Pearson had considered the idea of medicare and then said, 'Forget it! Let's just give people twenty-five dollars a week.' You want a fundamental difference between Mr. Harper and myself? Well, this is it.”
― Lawrence Martin, Harperland: The Politics Of Control

“The peace within and flowing from sacred spaces and architecture places is clothed in forgiveness, renunciation, and reconciliation.”
― Norris Brock Johnson, Tenryu-ji: Life and Spirit of a Kyoto Garden

“Peace is not just a desired state of being for people, but also enables the flourishing of nature as well as human-created landscapes.”
― Norris Brock Johnson, Tenryu-ji: Life and Spirit of a Kyoto Garden

“The culture's reverence for nature accentuates Kyoto's innate beauty. Designs on fabric, pottery, lacquer, and folding screens depict swirling water, budding branches, and birds in flight. Delicate woodcuts and scrolls celebrate the moonlight, rain, and snow. Elegant restaurant dishes arrive with edible garnishes of seasonal flora.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight.
You might miss the water.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Even in Kyoto--
Hearing the cuckoo's cry--
I long for Kyoto”
― Basho

“Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.”
― Judith Clancy, Kyoto Machiya Restaurant Guide: Affordable Dining in Traditional Townhouse Spaces

“Cool green foods became the natural choice in restaurants and teahouses. Matcha, the powdered green tea used for the tea ceremony, flavored ice cream, jewel-like gelatin cubes, and sweet whipped cream eaten in parfaits and layered with grapes, pineapple chunks, and chewy white mochi balls. There were Japanese-style snow cones, huge hills of shaved ice drizzled with green tea syrup, along with green tea-flavored mousse and tea-tainted sponge cake.
Matcha flavored savory items too, including green tea noodles served hot in dashi soup, as well as chilled and heaped on a bamboo draining mat with a cold dipping sauce of dashi, mirin, and soy. There was green tea-flavored wheat gluten and the traditional Kyoto-style dish of white rice topped with thin petals of sashimi that you "cooked" at the table by drenching it with brewed green tea from a tiny teapot.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“With each new course, he offers up little bites of the ethos that drives his cooking, the tastes and the words playing off each other like a kaiseki echo chamber.
Ark shell, a bulging, bright orange clam peeking out of its dark shell, barely cooked, dusted with seaweed salt.
"To add things is easy; to take them away is the challenge."
Bamboo, cut into wedges, boiled in mountain water and served in a wide, shallow bowl with nothing but the cooking liquid.
"How can we make the ingredient taste more like itself?With heat, with water, with knifework."
Tempura: a single large clam, cloaked in a pale, soft batter with more chew than crunch. The clam snaps under gentle pressure, releasing a warm ocean of umami.
"I want to make a message to the guest: this is the best possible way to cook this ingredient."
A meaty fillet of eel wrapped around a thumb of burdock root, glazed with soy and mirin, grilled until crispy: a three-bite explosion that leaves you desperate for more.
"The meal must go up and down, following strong flavors with subtle flavors, setting the right tone for the diner."
And it does, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, until the last frothy drop of matcha is gone, signaling the end of the meal.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Rice is sacred to the Japanese people," he says. "We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it." He points out that the word for rice in Japanese, gohan, is the same as the word for meal.
When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause.
The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice.
Next comes okoge, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy sansho pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of chazuke, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness- the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface.
The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others.
The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch.
The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below.
A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before.
The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“You don’t have to sleep if you don’t want to.” - Masao”
― Hidemi Woods, An Old Tree in Kyoto: How a Japanese girl got freedom

“I celebrated my arrival in Kyoto with a dinner of grilled eel, a sublime delicacy in Japan. In the water the fish resembles a ferocious jagged-toothed snake. But when sizzled over hot charcoal it looks like a fillet of sole that has spent the winter in Palm Beach. The skin turns crisp and smoky and the fatty white flesh, basted with a sweet soy syrup, becomes deeply tanned and as succulent as foie gras.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“To calm my jangled nerves, I rose early and went for a long jog along the Kamo River. As often happens during such times, the world came into stark relief. As I ran up the embankment, details popped, such as the nickel-blue river, topaz marsh grass, and leafless trees that looked almost silk-screened onto a paper panorama of Kyoto.
Flushed with endorphins, I dashed back to the Guesthouse feeling much calmer about meeting with the Grand Tea Master. By 8:00, I was down in the den drinking coffee and breakfasting on persimmon toast. Persimmons had recently come into season and, when sweet and jelly-soft, made a luscious topping for crisp buttered whole wheat bread.”
― Victoria Abbott Riccardi, Untangling My Chopsticks: A Culinary Sojourn in Kyoto

“The meal begins the way all kaiseki meals begin, with hassun, a mixed plate of small bites- fish and vegetables, usually- used to set the tone for the feast to come. In a bowl of pine needles and fallen leaves he hides smoky slices of bonito topped with slow-cooked seaweed, gingko nuts grilled until just tender, a summer roll packed with foraged herbs, and juicy wedges of persimmon dressed with ground sesame and sansho flowers. Autumn resonates in every bite.
While the rice simmers away, the meal marches forward: sashimi decorated with a thicket of mountain vegetables and wildflowers; a thick slab of Kyoto-style mackerel sushi, fermented for a year, with the big, heady funk of a washed cheese; mountain fruit blanketed in white miso and speckled with black sesame and bee larvae.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“The key to great bamboo, Yamashita tells me, is space. Bamboo trees can reproduce for six years, but their roots need room to spread, and the sun needs room to bake the forest floor. More than a farmer, Yamashita is a constant gardener, pruning branches, keeping the trees to a height of six meters, using rice husk to sow nutrients into the soil.
The best bamboo is found deep underground, safely away from sunlight, turning the harvest into something resembling a truffle hunt. We walk carefully and quietly through the forest, looking for little cracks in the earth that indicate a baby bamboo trying to make its way to the surface. When we spot cracks, Yamashita comes by with a small pick and gently works the soil until he reaches the bulb.
Most bamboo you see is ruddy brown or purple, but Yamashita's takenoko comes out lily white, tender, and sweet enough to eat like an apple.
"You have to cook it right away, otherwise you begin to lose the flavor," says Shunichi.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“First, a sizzling stone, the same one Toshio introduced to Ducasse years back. Today it's filled with rice and ginger juice and baby firefly squid, which crackle wildly as he tosses it all like a scalding salad and pushes it over to me. The squid guts coat the rice like an ocean risotto, give it body and funk, while the heat from the stone crisps the grains like a perfect bibimbap.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Next comes chawan mushi, a delicate egg custard studded with wild mountain vegetables and surrounded by flowers from the bamboo forest. A dish as old as Kyoto itself.
Toshio plucks two sacs of cod milt from the grill, slides them off the skewer into a squat clay box filled with bubbling miso. He comes back a second later with a scoop of konawata, pickled sea cucumber organs. A dish as new as the spring flowers blooming just outside the window.
One by one, the market stars reappear on the plate.
A black-and-gold lacquered bowl: Toshio pulls off the top to reveal thin slices of three-year-old virgin wild boar braised into sweet, savory submission with Kyoto white miso and chunks of root vegetables.
Uni- Hokkaido and Kansai- the first atop a wedge of taro root dusted with rice flour and lightly fried, the other resting gently on a fried shiso leaf. Two bites, two urchins, an echo of the lesson in the market this morning.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“He's on to sashimi now, fanning and curling slices of snapper and fugu into white roses on his cutting board. Before Toshio can plate the slices, Shunichi reaches over and calmly replaces the serving plate his son has chosen with an Edo-era ceramic rectangle more to his liking.
Three pieces of tempura- shrimp, eggplant, new onion- emerge hissing and golden from the black iron pot in the corner, and Toshio arranges them on small plates with wedges of Japanese lime. Before the tempura goes out, Shunichi sneaks in a few extra granules of salt while Toshio's not looking.
By now Dad is shadowing his son's every move. As Toshio waves a thin plank of sea cucumber eggs over the charcoal fire, his dad leans gently over his shoulder. "Be careful. You don't want to cook it. You just want to release its aroma."
Toshio places a fried silverfish spine on a craggy ceramic plate, tucks grated yuzu and sansho flowers into its ribs, then lays a sliver of the dried eggs over the top. The bones shatter like a potato chip, and the sea cucumber detonates in my mouth.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“I put my phone away and stare out the window at Japan's countryside, watching the scenery zip by at 320 kilometers per hour. Mount Fuji has come and gone, as have laundry on metal merry-go-racks, houses plastered with party signs, weathered baseball diamonds, an ostrich farm, and now, miles of rice paddy fields tended by people wearing conical hats and straw coats. Japan is dressed in her best this morning, sunny and breezy, with few clouds in the sky as accessories. It's the first official day of spring. Cherry blossoms have disappeared in twists of wind or trampled into the ground. Takenoko, bamboo season, will begin soon.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“He hopes we'll visit again soon. Perhaps in June, to see the emerald-colored frogs that stick to the stalks and attend Gion Matsuri, a festival where women dress in summer kimonos and the shops are decorated with art. There are floats in the evening and music spills onto the streets.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“We dine in Gion---the geisha district, Kyoto's heart and spiritual center. There are rickety teahouses, master sword makers, and women dressed in kimonos. The restaurant is by invitation only and seats seven, but the chef prefers to keep the guest count under five. His name is Komura, and like the bamboo farmer Shirasu and his son, his two daughters assist him. The sisters light candles in bronze holders and place them around the room. The restaurant is a converted home, the walls a deep ebony stained from years of smoke from the open hearth----it's called kurobikari, black luster. It's a hidden gem nestled between a pachinko parlor and an antiques shop.
The table we kneel at is made of thick wood, its surface weathered, worn, and polished, honed by years of hands and plates and cups of tea.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“I take a deep breath. Hard to do since my waist in cinched so tight. Mariko certainly worked her fairy godmother magic. My kimono is teal silk stitched with silver threads to mimic rippling water and embroidered with multi-colored lily pads. Hair pulled back in a low bun with a chrysanthemum pin complements the outfit.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“I lose my breath, find it again. I don't want to break this spell. I'm completely besotted. In love with Kyoto, with Japan. We come to the end, to the palace gates as they open.
At the gate, I turn and bow. Thank you.
Mr. Fuchigami is there, enjoying the lanterns with the rest of the staff. "Your Highness, did you enjoy your dinner?" he asks.
I nod. Can he see how happy I am? How my eyes shine with joy?
He steps toward me. "You've won the heart of Kyoto." The lantern bearers surround me and all at once, they let go. Glowing orbs drift to the sky in a perfect circle of light.
It's beautiful. Truly beautiful. A golden crown.”
― Emiko Jean, Tokyo Ever After

“Many of the featured establishments have been around for generations, some for hundreds of years. The reason is that whilst Kyoto is a modern city, it is also an ancient city where much of Japanese culture sprouted and developed, including many aspects of the Japanese kitchen. Visiting these establishments, experiencing their hospitality, and sampling their wares is literally taking a tour through a significant part of Japanese culinary history, often in the original setting. It’s a unique opportunity for anyone with an interest in Kyoto and Japanese culture more generally. Through these establishments, you can feel the Kyoto style and by extension a core aspect of Japanese style.”
― Chikashi Miyamoto, An Insider’s Guide to Authentic Kyoto for Foodies: A Curated List of Where to Eat and Drink in Kyoto

“One of the recurring themes mentioned in this guide is the quality of well water in Kyoto. Their soft water is an essential ingredient in making many of their gastronomic creations exceptional. However, it takes people to recognise its importance and use the resource appropriately and responsibly. It requires care. It requires sensibility. The availability of their superior well water is happenstance, but the creative use of it is hardly an accident. It’s because of the crafts practised by the people.”
― Chikashi Miyamoto, An Insider’s Guide to Authentic Kyoto for Foodies: A Curated List of Where to Eat and Drink in Kyoto

“This little place is a jewel that is quite possibly my #1 eatery in the world. Pre-publication, I said that [O] is in my global top five, but after actually giving the notion some thought, I don’t think there is another restaurant anywhere in the world that I would rather visit.”
― Chikashi Miyamoto, An Insider’s Guide to Authentic Kyoto for Foodies: A Curated List of Where to Eat and Drink in Kyoto

“Stewed arame and deep-fried tofu. Okra croquettes. Kikuna leaves dressed with sesame and miso. Kurama-style sardine. Hirosu tofu ball in broth. Pork belly simmered in Kyobancha tea. Fresh tofu curd with sour plum paste. Oh, and Kioshi's rice-bran-pickled cucumbers. Nothing too extravagant. If anything, the highlights are probably the firmly cooked Goshu rice and the miso soup with ebi-imo taro. Anyway, enjoy the meal. Oh, and make sure you put a good sprinkle of sansho pepper on the soup--- it'll warm you right up.”
― Hisashi Kashiwai, The Kamogawa Food Detectives