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      "text": "When I visited Kyoto a couple of months ago, I noticed something surprising. All the major temples and shrines I was visiting, like the famous Torii gates, are located outside of the city center. As I looked over the city from one of the hills on the outskirts, this struck me as strange because the former imperial palace is located right in the center. Why not have the biggest religious buildings there too? And as I kept thinking, I realized I didn't know much about Kyoto's history at all. It's a place bursting at the seams with temples, shrines, palaces, and castles. In 2019, 88,000,000 tourists descended on the city to visit the torii gates or the bamboo forest, the shiki market, or another site. There are about 2,000 shrines and temples in and around Kyoto alone. With all of that history, it can be hard to understand the comprehensive story of a place and this is something I know firsthand. This video is for anyone interested in Kyoto or maybe you're visiting Kyoto and you want a better geographic and historical understanding of the city. This is basically the video I wish I had before I visited. Now, I'll answer the question of why most major shrines and temples are located outside the city center as well as give you that full historical geographic understanding. Let's get to it after the bike bell. Kyoto is located here in southern Honshu, the biggest island in Japan, about 50 kilometers northeast of Osaka. The city is near the confluence of the Katsura and Kammu Rivers. Today, Kyoto is home to about 1,500,000 residents, but in the early 7 100, it was empty. But Emperor Kanmu saw the benefits of this location for a future capital city. The freshwater access was an obvious plus. The hills that fed the rivers are full of timber, allowing for the rapid construction of a brand new city. And, of course, hills provide the city with some defense from invaders, something any new capital city would need. Perhaps even more important from a symbolic perspective was the way the hills surrounded the city site on three sides. According to Chinese tradition, a city needed to be protected by hills on 3 of the cardinal directions, with the south left open and mountain free. The Japanese at the time were strongly influenced by Japanese culture and traditions, so Kyoto was a jackpot from that perspective. This geography is sometimes cited as one of the reasons why Kyoto lasted so long as a capital city for 100 and 100 of years. And this is actually notable because this is not the first capital city that Emperor Kanmu founded. He founded a capital at Nagaoka, Kyoto 10 years earlier before moving it to Kyoto, likely due to flood concerns. A few years before that, he had the capital move to there from modern day Nara. 3rd time's a charm, I guess. But he wasn't the only emperor moving the capital around. You can see on this map all the places that were the capital in the century or so before Kyoto became the capital for a good long time until it moved during the Mi'eji restoration. Okay. So Emperor Kanmu founded Kyoto in 794. I should let you know that the original name for the city was actually Hiankio, but I'm gonna keep using Kyoto in this video just for simplicity's sake. And while I have you, I should just mention that Kyoto is a city with so much history and culture, I'm not gonna be able to get to it. I'm condensing it for 10 minutes, so I'm sorry if I miss anything. Same with all the landmarks in Kyoto, I'm gonna miss something. If you wanna learn more about the history of Kyoto, check out the book Kyoto and Urban History of Japan's Premodern Capital by Matthew Stavros. I'll put a link to the book in the description. It's just great. It was one of my primary sources for this video though I definitely included others which are also in the description. Okay. Back to the video. So now we understand why the city is where it is with the rivers and hills. Let's look at the original city plan. Again, it follows a traditional Chinese model with a rectilinear grid. Grid fans rejoice. The site slopes from north to south and the imperial palace is located at the center of the northern highest part of the city. Surprisingly, this imperial palace is not the same as the current imperial palace, which we can see if we superimpose the traditional plan over modern Kyoto. Why the move? Well, the old Hyiyan Palace was super flammable. It burned down all the time. It burned out so many times that historians assume that arson was a factor. It just burned down repeatedly over and over. And while it was being rebuilt, emperors in the meantime would rule from their family palaces. The most elite families lived in the northeast quadrant of the old city. The current imperial palace grounds actually encompasses much of this elite district. And when it was a functioning imperial palace before the emperor moved the capital to Tokyo in 18/69, the palace was filled with the homes of nobles as well as the emperor. After the move, most of the noble houses were demolished to make way for the imperial gardens. The imperial palace itself is a descendant of an old mansion of the Fujiwara clan, one of the most influential families in Japanese history. Of course, the current palace has also been rebuilt many times due to, you guessed it, fire. The original plan of Kyoto also gave some of the street structure that is still in use today. Here, I'll highlight some of the streets that existed then and still exist now. The original plan also featured perfectly square blocks that over time eroded a little to some of the walkingness present in the current central area of the city, but it's still close enough. Eventually, a future emperor added additional north south streets, which is why the blocks are no longer squares. It turns out that frontage along the street was important for merchants, so more street frontage is better. One final note about the original Kyoto city plan before we move out of the city center and into the hills. The original plan forbade almost any type of religious building within its boundaries. There are only 3 temples as a part of the original city plan. One of these temples still exists, Toji Temple at the southern end of the original plan located here. Today, it's a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It had a counterpart, Seiji, which was once here. Today, there's a park with some ruins you can go and check out. Between those temples, by the way, was the Rashomon, the grand gate at the southern end of the boulevard that led to the original imperial palace. By the 1100, it had fallen into disrepair. The shabby state of the gate became a backdrop for Akira Kurosawa's movie, Rashomon, where it symbolized the decline of Japanese culture. Okay. Back to religion. With so few temples and shrines within the official city limits, many nobles would build private temples in their own compounds of essentially flaunting the rules of the city. They would also patronize temples and shrines outside the city limits turning them into impressive pieces of religious architecture. I do wanna be clear that there are now temples and shrines in the center of the city but they're not from the initial phase of Kyoto's existence. Therefore, many of the noble temples that are now major tourist attractions are from the medieval era, not the initial founding era and are located at the edge of the city. What's interesting to a city planner like myself is that these ex urban temples and shrines created a form of medieval suburban sprawl. How? Well, first of all, despite the fact that temples and shrines weren't allowed in the city limits, religion was an important part of Japanese life at the time and lots of people wanted to go to shrines and temples. Wealthy elites often sponsored the construction of lavish temples to demonstrate their piety, curry favor with the larger populace, or use them as elaborate tax havens. Temples back then were tax exempt just like they are in the United States today. These large temples also attracted religious pilgrims, which turned them into tourist destinations. Whole communities sprung up around them to cater to locals and tourists alike. These temple communities became hugely influential in Kyoto era politics and even the politics of Japan as a whole. Back in the 13th 14th centuries, emperors of Japan would retire and still rule after retirement. This is called cloistered rule, and they would do so from their own massive temple palaces. Here are a few of them on the map. First up is the temple of the golden pavilion, one of the most popular tourist attractions in Kyoto today. I'm guessing it has something to do with the striking gold exterior and the location on the water within the larger Kinkakuji complex. The complex was originally a villa for a powerful elite noble clan, and around the 12 twenties, they built the first iteration of the temple. It wouldn't see its first gold exterior till over a 100 years later though. The Kinkaku ji temple is another great example of a cloistered rural facility. This one was originally a palace built by Emperor Saga at 814. Several former emperors conducted cloistered rule there in the heyday of the practice. While I'm listening some well known and interesting religious buildings on Kyoto's fringe, I want to bring up a couple that aren't actually cloistered rule temples but have their own unique backstories. The first is a Shinto shrine, Fushimi Inari Taisha. This is a shrine that seems purpose built for Instagram, with 10,000 torii gates forming a tunnel up the hillside on the southeast side of Kyoto. This shrine is not actually dedicated to the deity of Instagram, but instead the kami of rice. The founding of the shrine predates the founding of Kyoto itself established in 711. The shrine gained favor in the early years of Kyoto though, and by the 900, it was receiving plenty of medieval patronage. Emperors elevated the shrine to the highest level in the entire country and its opulence reflects this position. The second shrine I wanna mention also predates Kyoto itself. It's the Yasaka Shrine in the Gion district across the Kamo River from central Kyoto. It was founded back in 656. It too received significant imperial patronage in later years and was elevated to the most important shrines in all of Kyoto. Yasaka Shrine is also notable for being located in Japan's most famous geisha district, Gion. I need to make a couple of clarifying points here. First, in Kyoto, they're called Gheiko not Geisha. And second, Gheiko as we know them today did not come into fashion until the 18th century. Prior to that, Gion was like all of the other neighborhoods outside of central Kyoto, a district for pilgrims to the nearby temple. In this case, Yasaka Shrine. It eventually evolved into a popular entertainment district. Today, it's a great place to visit and besides occasionally spying at Geiko, you can take in a large historic district that seems, again, purpose built for Instagram. It's really popular during cherry blossom season. So a lot of Kyoto can be understood from the framework that religious users weren't allowed in the center of the city and that so many nobles lived in the northeast corner of the old city that they moved their imperial palace there. But I wanna talk about another important landmark in the city from a different later era, Nijo Castle. Nijo Castle's construction was instigated by Oda Numinaga, an influential daimyo or noble, and credited as one of the great unifiers of Japan in the 16th century. It was built along one of the main streets of Kyoto, Muromachi Road, in a corner of the old imperial palace complex. The construction still required the demolition of thousands of homes and over 15,000 workers began the project. If you look at the map here, you can see that the castle doesn't conform to the street grid. It's exactly 3 degrees off. Historians believe the reason for this is that the castle designers used a new technology, the magnetic compass to lay out the castle. The castle is oriented to magnetic north from the time while the 8th century street grid is aligned to geographic north. The castle was expanded on by the shogun Tokugawa Ieyasu in the beginning of the 1600 and he forced nobles to contribute to its construction. The castle was built to provide a vantage point to spot invaders on all sides of the city and this was an era where centralized castles were in vogue. Edo Castle in Tokyo built a 100 years earlier is another example of this type of castle. And speaking of Edo in Tokyo, Kyoto's fortunes did wane a bit after the Meiji restoration that formally moved Japan's seat of power to the city up north. But luckily, Kyoto continued to grow and modernize and did not fade away and did so all while maintaining its historic structures. It was relatively unscarred from World War 2 as well. The resulting city that still feels very contemporary and alive while still absolutely laden with amazing sights. It's avoided a fate similar to Venice which is a former world power city that has now been crushed under the weight of overtourism. So just a heads up, my next video is on another iconic city, this time San Francisco. Now, San Francisco is an incredibly polarized city in the US political landscape with some people saying it's beautiful and diverse while other people saying it's full of homeless people in crime. What I was doing in research on this video, I used ground news to help me cut through the bias and understand people's different perspectives on this iconic city. For example, recently Elon Musk announced that he was moving the headquarters of Twitter or X, sorry, out of San Francisco. So this story not only has a San Francisco narrative, but also an Elon Musk narrative. 2 very polarizing topics. Ground news lets you look at all the news outlets and show their political bias on this nice little chart over on the side column here. You can see that 41 news outlets have reported on Twitter's move and intelligently takes all the news articles and turns them into easily digestible bullet points. But that's not even the coolest thing. It can also change the summary based on political bias. And the bias comparison even shows you how the news outlets differed on their reporting. The left leaning articles focus more on Elon Musk, while the right leaning articles focus more on San Francisco's government. It's just super cool stuff. I certainly find it helpful when researching video topics like this one. It just helped me cut through the bias and know what's true and what's not. It's a great tool for helping you become a better critical thinker and better media consumer which is super valuable and something I know you, my audience, appreciates. In fact, I believe Ground News is so useful that I'm offering 40% off their Vantage subscription. You can only access this offer through my link, so go to ground.news/citybeautiful or click on the link on screen or in the description and go support an independent media platform working to make the world's news more transparent.",
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