Arashiyama’s landscape embodies centuries of layered history, extending back to the Heian era and beyond.
Kyoto reveals a civilizational depth that exposes ignorance toward history, culture, and philosophy.

Recently, as I looked upon Arashiyama, I found myself thinking about many things.
2016-01-03
One of the major elements shaping the present landscape of Arashiyama is the Oi River, which was developed by Ryōi Suminokura.
Suminokura Ryōi, born in 1554 and deceased in 1614, was a wealthy Kyoto merchant of the Sengoku period.
With the launch of the Red Seal Ship trade, he conducted commerce with Annam and invested his own fortune to excavate the Oi River and the Takase River in Yamashiro.
By order of the shogunate, he also carried out river works on the Fuji River and the Tenryū River.
In Kyoto, he is known less as a merchant than as one of the “fathers of water transport,” alongside Sakurō Tanabe.
In other words, the foundations of Arashiyama were created in an era when the United States did not yet exist as a nation.
Yet it goes without saying that the landscape of Arashiyama does not begin with that period.
The Osawa Pond at Daikaku-ji, which I often visit after Arashiyama and Tenryū-ji, preserves a landscape dating back at least to the ninth century.
It is a landscape from the time when Kūkai was alive.
That fact alone is enough to say that Daikaku-ji deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, or perhaps even a Nobel Prize in Literature.
The vulgarity of Roosevelt and Truman, who seriously contemplated dropping an atomic bomb on Kyoto,
their ignorance toward history, culture, and philosophy,
and their intolerable, indeed unforgivable, discriminatory mindset.
Or the indescribable ugliness and foolishness of those who devoted themselves solely to intrigue and profit.
As I look upon Kyoto, represented by Arashiyama,
and indeed Kyoto in its entirety,
I cannot help but feel these things ever more deeply.
This manuscript continues.