Where Is the True Kyoto? A City Read by Land and Water

The event that first set in motion the image of "Kyoto" that most people hold today came in 794, when the emperor abandoned Nara, where the capital had long stood, and resolved to move the seat of rule to Kyoto. This relocation of the capital—the land where the emperor resides and the political center of the realm—is called sento (遷都).

In a real sense, one can still say that the capital remains Kyoto—and here lies a deep root of the complex rivalry between east and west, Kanto and Kansai, that continues inside Japan to this day.

Against this historical backdrop, the people of Kyoto carry a deep pride in being the true bearers of Japanese culture.

Today, most people naturally assume that the capital of Japan is Tokyo. Yet astonishingly, Tokyo has never once been designated the capital of Japan by law. Even among the Japanese, this fact is scarcely known.

Roughly a thousand years later, however, on September 3, 1868, in the midst of the Meiji Restoration, a decision was made to move the capital from Kyoto to Edo—not at the will of the emperor, but on a proposal put forward by Takato Oki and Shinpei Eto of the new government.

Under pressure from the new regime's forces, the emperor announced that he would leave Kyoto and move to Edo. Edo was renamed Tokyo, and the actual functions of a capital shifted east.

In that age, the area of present-day Kyoto was a remote backwater even within the province then called Yamashiro (山背). The name Yamashiro came from the view out of the capital in Nara: looking toward the Nara Hills that rose along the border between Nara and Kyoto, the land beyond them was literally "the back of the mountains"—the far side.

It was a disparaging name. That alone tells us how little value the Kyoto basin held for the emperors and aristocrats of Nara, who saw it as an unprofitable tract and even a precarious place beyond the reach of court governance.

Forced to move the seat of rule into the Kyoto basin, Emperor Kanmu knew that a disparaging name like Yamashiro (山背) would not do. Fearing that a province bearing a slight for its name would sap the centripetal authority of the new court, he officially changed the characters to Yamashiro (山城) to give the new capital legitimacy. The pronunciation remained the same, but in place of "back," the character for "castle" or "fortress" was bestowed upon the land.

In 794, Heian-kyo was born in what is now the city of Kyoto, drawing the eyes of the realm to that basin for the first time.

Yet the reigning sovereign, Emperor Kanmu, was driven into such a corner by the fierce struggles for power breaking out inside the court that he had no choice but to find a new land for the capital.

In Japanese history, when a capital moved to another place, the old system was very often swept away and reformed. A move of the capital was not a change of address. It also had the aim of discarding the vested interests of the old rulers.

Kanmu wanted to escape the political schemes of the rulers who clung like parasites to the system of Heijo-kyo, which had stood since 710, and he moved the capital north to Nagaoka-kyo (in today's Nagaokakyo, Kyoto Prefecture).

Moving a capital to another place takes an enormous sum.

For the Hata it was a once-in-a-thousand-years opportunity, the best chance to win real political power.

The Hata were a rising immigrant power that had come to Japan in the fifth and sixth centuries, and they had brought the continent's technologies: silk-raising, weaving, flood control, earthworks, brewing. Their origins are still unclear, but I think they formed from a mixing of several lines.

What the Hata offered was the vast land and the funds for building the city. For Kanmu, who had no other move left, it was an attractive offer, and since Kyoto also let him keep his distance from Heijo-kyo, he accepted. In this way, in 794, the capital moved to Heian-kyo.

They also took part in founding Matsuo Taisha and Fushimi Inari Taisha in Kyoto. In fact, until the Meiji era banned the hereditary priesthood, Matsuo Taisha had long been served by descendants of the Hata as head priests.

The Hata were an immigrant clan, so we can see that Kanmu had drawn closer to the rising powers than to the dynamics of the old ancient clans.

There is in fact a small district called "the true Kyoto." The rest corresponds to Kyoto Prefecture and the city of Kyoto, but strictly speaking it is not "Kyoto." This is the first important point.

Going back in history, the name "Kyoto" once meant a particular space where the court, in which the imperial family governed, was located. The source of today's Kyoto is the move of the capital to Heian-kyo in 794. Before that there were various places that counted as a "Kyoto," in Nara, in Osaka, in southern Kyoto and elsewhere.

In today's city of Kyoto, taking the Imperial Palace (Kyoto Gyoen), where the emperor lived until the Edo period, as the pivot, one district is marked by Kawaramachi Street on the east, Horikawa Street on the west, Marutamachi Street on the north and Shijo Street on the south, and only the inside of it is "the true Kyoto."

It follows that the areas most tourists visit as Kyoto are, strictly, not "Kyoto" but "outside Kyoto." Tourists are not seeing Kyoto. They are seeing what lies outside it.

Why is the reality of Kyoto, with so long a history, unclear? Because Kyoto was a battlefield many times and burned and was rebuilt again and again. Each time there was renewal, the old history was lost, and Kyoto was reborn in a new form.

The Rajomon is said to have stood on the west side of Toji, which stands southwest of today's Kyoto Station.

It is clear that Suzaku Oji ran through the west of today's city of Kyoto, but the whole picture is still unknown.

The main cause of the people's move east was the environment of the area where Heian-kyo was first built.

The first condition for judging good fusui rests on the idea of "shishin soo no chi" (四神相応の地), land in correspondence with the four guardian gods.

What may confuse us a little from a modern sense is that these east, west, south and north are not the absolute directions of Google Maps and the like, but are seen from the main base in the city's design. The universal east, west, south and north we picture today do not exist; fusui holds the view that east, west, south and north move from place to place. The way of taking east, west, south and north in fusui therefore changes with whether the axis is the imperial palace of Heian-kyo, Osaka Castle or Edo Castle.

Japanese fusui, unlike China's, takes "water" as its premise, and the dragon god is still enshrined as its symbol. Put another way, how human beings coexist with water and at times hold it down is always the matter of life and death at the root of Japanese cities.

What many people get wrong is the thought that Tokyo and Osaka are the safest. In the natural disasters I described, the highest risk is in large cities.