The Kinkaku-ji and the Snow That Fell Upward

I wish this were some mystical fairy tale brimming with magic, hobgoblins and a clear moral from which our children would undoubtedly profit.  It isn't.   It is the story of a single, tiny insight into the collective thought process of an entire race of people...which on reflection, ain't all that bad.


I've visited about 100 countries over the years, and I've done business in more than 40 of those.  I've had logistics meetings about how to protect equipment from "theft" as it is transported from Western Europe into the former Soviet Union--with scary Ex-Colonels in the KGB.  I've discussed cocktail party arrangements in former Hapsburg palaces; I've gone to battle for my British employees with arrogant French telecommunications technologists who refused to deliver services to the English on a weekend; I've suffered "American" jokes at the hands of London taxi drivers and have been equally berated for entire taxi rides because I sold out and went to work for "telecomms" (the pejorative term used to describe British Telecom in the old days).  I've had dinner with the best friend of a sitting king and heard the "actual price" of  access to the king whether a meeting was held or not (I did not avail myself this opportunity, although I continued to get hand-engraved Christmas cards from the friend every year for a decade).  I've sat and watched the "Azuri" lose to Germany with an Italian whose passion for bicycle racing has been with him since he was a soldier with Mussolini's army and is surpassed only by his deeply abiding love for the Italian football team. 


In short, I've seen quite a few things in this world but none match the incredible sight of the Kinkaku-ji and the snow falling upward around it.  First a little explanation.  Kyoto (whose name means "capital) is a city that, thankfully, is on the world's list of places that are special to humanity, and is located between Tokyo and Osaka about a one-hour bullet train ride from Kansai Airport. Until the Edo period, when the capital and the Emperor were moved to Tokyo ("northern capital") by the new Shogun, Kyoto was the cultural, military, governmental, and religious center of the Japanses world. It was from here that all laws, rules, trends, and beliefs in Japan were promolguated for nearly a thousand years; and it was here that nearly all military campaigns began or ended.  As the center of the country, in its early years Kyoto came to have some extraordinary shrines, temples and torii's donated by the various imperial courtiers.  The Kinkaku-ji (Golden Pavilion) dates from 1397 and, although it has been rebuilt an renovated several times over that period, it remains essentially as designed more than 600 years ago. Kyoto, and by extension the Kinkaku-ji, was conciously spared any bombing raids during WWII because of fears that it would be perceived after the war as barbaric cultural desecration of a defeated enemy. (I agree.)


The grounds of the temple were designed to take advantage of the terrain and of the location of the temple in a unique way.  To get to the temple you walk up a very peaceful and serene pathway that winds through a woods that appears at first to be endless.  As you rise in height, the pathway sweeps around to the right and you realize that you are coming out of the woods at eye-level with a pond that appears to be a huge mirror on its back...it is flat and from your vantage, a perfect cradle of water from which rises the temple pavilion.  I have no doubt that this pathway was designed (and is maintained) to present a stunning effect as you pass out of the woods and into the presence of the temple itself--I can report the designer's success from personal experience.

I visited the Kinkaku-ji only once, during an overnight stop in Kyoto on my way to Osaka for a business meeting.  This was in April, at the very tail-end of winter, and the weather was raw and cold with light rain as we took a taxi to the temple site.  I was less than enthusiastic about this sidetrip since my Osaka meeting was with the Regional President of our client company and I was focused more on business than beauty. When we arrived, my "accompanier" (I never went anywhere in Japan on business without a formal business escort fluent in English and technology) strongly suggested that I take the long pathway up the hill to the shrine rather than the short set of stairs and paved pathway that was the more common "American" alternative.  I trusted him and so I followed the path that he indicated. 

As our small group made its way up the path,  I was struck by how silent the walk was.  The ground was simply dirt covered with the remnants of the leaves and small branches that had fallen over the winter, and while the path had obviously been cut out of the woods, it seemed like a natural route that might have been padded out of the forest floor by generations of animals on their way to the pond above us. And during the walk, almost as though it was scripted, the nasty misty cold drizzle turned to a full-bodied, fluffy, pure white fall of snow.  As we rounded the last bend in the trail, I realized we had been climbing slowly but steadily upward toward the level of the temple, and the beautiful gold-leaf structure was revealing itself from top to bottom with every additional step we took...and then I noticed an impossible phenomenon: the snow was falling upward!  Because of our perspective on the pond and the angle that we were approaching the temple, and the absolute smoothness of the pond, I was able to witness the impossible.  As the snow fell downward in the real world, it rebounded upward from an invisible line into a fantasy world of gold temples, gray skies and an improbable glow.

I'm afraid words escape me here. There really is no way that I know to describe the surreal sense of snow rising from the earth into a golden pavilion in the sky.  Please take my word, though, that it was simply the most spectacular thing I have ever witnessed short of the births of my children.  My young Japanese friends, engineers all, were nearly overcome that I should have experienced this sight while they were with me.  It was, I think, more important to them that I had experienced this most mystical and purely Japanese perception, and that they had been privileged to witness it with me.  And I was awestruck by the notion that this tableau had been anticipated, analyzed, designed, engineered and constructed on the off chance that over the succeeding hundreds of years, some person would be at a particular place at a particular time during particular conditions and would appreciate what this artist had anticipated.

As an aside, I can't remember the outcome of the meeting the next day, I can't remember the topic discussed, I can't remember the client (except that he was a very inexpensive drunk). But I will never forget the Kinkaku-ji and the snow that fell upward.