Arrival: Kyoto in High Summer Heat

Kyoto in July is not the Kyoto of travel posters. The heat is serious — consistently above thirty-five degrees, dense with humidity, the stone and asphalt of the old city absorbing and radiating warmth in equal measure. And yet this is the city at its most completely itself, because the discomfort is ancient and shared, a seasonal condition that has been built into Kyoto’s culture for over a thousand years. The festival is not despite the heat but in some sense about it — a communal act of endurance and celebration, an acknowledgment that summer must be honoured precisely because it is almost unbearable. You arrive in early July for Yoiyama, the three nights of atmospheric street festivals preceding the main procession, and find the district around Nishiki Market already transformed: the yamaboko floats half-assembled in the middle of closed-off streets, their wooden frames bound with rope using techniques unchanged since the Heian period, craftsmen working in the evening heat by the light of paper lanterns.