On November 20, 2025, the author photographed the autumn colors of Kyoto’s Tofukuji and Arashiyama, as they have done for over twenty years. With China’s travel ban restoring Kyoto’s long-lost quiet, Tofukuji once again displayed its remarkably precise foliage cycle. On the train home, the author revisited two classical pieces—Karajan’s Cavalleria Rusticana Intermezzo and Sorimachi–Battistoni’s Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody—which deeply moved them. A vivid record of a rare, peaceful Kyoto.

On November 20, 2025, guided by the autumn foliage information in the Kyoto Shimbun, I headed to Tofukuji, which had been reported as reaching its peak in recent days.
I had already decided to go today after carefully checking the weather forecast.
For more than twenty years, I have never failed to photograph Kyoto’s autumn foliage.
Therefore, I say this with an absolute conviction that comes from lived experience.
The global warming hysteria is a fraud devised by China and certain international swindlers from Canada.
Trump’s speech at the United Nations was, in fact, entirely correct.
The NHK announcers—embodying pseudo-morality, political correctness, masochistic historical views, and anti-Japanese ideology—are nothing more than people who simply “do not understand,” such as Kuwako and her peers.

I always begin photographing Kyoto’s autumn with Tofukuji.
Tofukuji reaches its peak foliage with astonishing accuracy on November 17 through 21, and on the 28th.
It fits this period almost perfectly every year.
I speak with a close friend every year.
“The people of ancient times were truly extraordinary.
Their observation of nature was impeccable.
Compared to that, how careless, fragile, and easily deceived the postwar Japanese have become.
How lamentable it is that we are fooled by obvious lies so easily,” I say.

Thanks to the most “grateful” decision—indeed, a boon—by the Chinese dictator Xi Jinping to ban Chinese tourists from visiting Japan, I was able to walk from the station to Tofukuji in comfort, something I had not experienced for nearly a decade, just like the climate itself.
The true charm of Kyoto had returned.
For people living in the Tokyo metropolitan area who love Kyoto but had given up visiting because it was filled with Chinese tourists, now is precisely the time to come.

Even at the restaurant where I had lunch—long overrun in recent years by Chinese tourists, including tattooed Chinese who, in the CCP’s country, could only be mafia—there was a remarkable change.
Gone were the coarse, loud men and women shouting across the tables.
Today, the place was filled with the kind of genuinely pleasant Kyoto visitors who had disappeared for years.

As planned, I reached Arashiyama, but the fickle clouds kept the sunlight coming and going.
I decided to cancel my intended shooting spot, but at least entered the area around Togetsukyo Bridge.
For the first time in my life, I suddenly felt fatigue in my legs and turned back to head home.

On the JR train, I noticed that someone had “liked” last year’s photo collection of Tofukuji’s autumn foliage.
I began listening through Sony’s top-class earphones to the same two classical pieces I had paired with that collection, and I was nearly moved to tears.

I decided then that I would pair today’s photographs with the same two pieces and send them out to the world.
The two works were:
Mascagni’s Intermezzo from Cavalleria Rusticana, conducted by Herbert von Karajan with the Berlin Philharmonic;
and Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, performed by Kyohei Sorimachi under Andrea Battistoni.
This chapter will continue.