I Long for Kyoto

It’s 6:00am and the sun’s already up. I get up from my futon and change into my running gear. A kilometer from my studio — a dormitory space under KICL — and I’m jogging along the dirt path by the Kamo River. The trees speckle some shade on the ground. I sweat. By the water, a stork unfurls its wings and passes just above my head, cicadas whirring all around me. 

There’s a Family Mart (or: famima) right by my apartment where I pick up my post-run usual — a 129-yen mentaiko onigiri and a bottle of hojicha, warmed. Back indoors I bite into the crisp nori, savouring the umami-rich cod roe mingling with the pert vinegared rice as I review my notes for the day. From my fridge, a plump, blushing Wakayama peach — ripe with juice in its peak season — balances the earthy notes of my tea. Twenty-five kanji per day. Ten grammar terms. Five sheets drills and reading passages. It’s been two weeks since my Japanese summer intensive at KICL began, eight years since I last studied the language. For this six weeks*, I have the time I need to relearn and take in everything new again.

*While the program lasted for 4 weeks, I extended my stay in Kyoto before and after the course ended.

From 9:30am to 12:30pm, I join my intermediate-level classmates in immersing ourselves with coursework. Since the first day, Tachizawa-sensei has steadfastly conducted lessons entirely in Japanese, and I am coming to appreciate how much easier I follow her words as the days progress. We take quizzes. Practice sample listening passages. Converse. Outside, Kyoto’s cityscape unfolds in the loud summer heat, a folding screen sliding towards the mountain where our classroom rests.

In the afternoon, I will attend a wagashi-making workshop, one of the many cultural activities the institute has offered to supplement our language learning work. It’s a special day. My classmates and I head over to the campus’ cafeteria for a quick lunch, where we slurp our chilled soba/udon noodles, crunch into the precisely-battered katsu cutlet alongside pickled vegetables and heaping grains of pearled rice, as we continue our conversations in halting Japanese — the only common language among our numerous tongues. In an hour, I learn of the night markets in Taiwan, vegan cafes in Paris, snow-capped Canada.

We take two buses to Kanshundo Honten, a long-established wagashi specialist store, older than my grandmother’s knees. Wagashi, or wa-gashi, are traditional confectionery firmly Japanese (Wa) in its character and name, including its ingredients, designs, and techniques. And yet in its rootedness it’s also fluid — changing with the seasons, moulded under different pairs of hands. We watch, transfixed, as the instructor moulds a chrysanthemum — flushing pastel pink and shiroan white — with just his two fingers and a pair of chopsticks.

It’s a little into the evening when the workshop ends, and we take home our varied sugary struggles at replicating the instructor’s finesse. The sun’s still up, so it’s still early. “Karaoke?” my classmate raises to the group. We laugh. もちろん! — was it even a question?

Kanshundo’s just some walks away to Gion-Shijo — the vibrant core of this city — and there we find rows and rows of karaoke stores, izakayas, and konbinis. We queue all the Japanese songs we know between us, from heavy metal to bright AKB48 pop, and sing until we run over our time. We sing more as we tuck into our shoyu-brushed Kyoto chicken skewers at dinner, delightfully bouncy against the crisp, mind-boggling sweetness of “Kyoyasai” cabbage — one of the iconic vegetables grown in the region. What a different world, I thought, from the New York weekend brunch-socials, the chaotic subways, the dark winters that I’ve grown accustomed to in my year of graduate studies. It’s silly to think that just a month ago, I kept questioning whether I could even survive the intensity of the programme with my rusty Japanese, and living in this big-hearted, culturally-lush forest of a city, where the same ordinary vegetable can taste so different, so rich.

What can one even learn in six weeks? It’s a little over 11:00pm when I, along with my classmates, catch the last bus back to our lodgings, bellies bubbling from the cocktail of chuhais as were our minds, strained from our near-constant speech in Japanese. Yet it’s also a little under midnight when I compose my first formal e-mail in the language. Upon returning home in August, I register for December’s JLPT N2 examinations, along with a few of my classmates. I write this in January 2020, where two days ago, I learn that we all pass.

Min Lim was a student in the upper intermediate class over the summer of 2019 at KICL. She is a graduate student in the Columbia-LSE Masters Programme in International and World History, currently based in London. Prior to the course, she studied Japanese for four years in Singapore, between 2008 and 2011, and rediscovered her passion again that summer.