Arashiyama and "Edible Incense"

It was late afternoon when we returned to Kyoto from Nara. It was still too early to go back to the hotel, so Mom and I decided to be spontaneous and call a cab to drive us all the way from Kyoto Station to Arashiyama, which literally means "Storm Mountain", a district on the far western outskirts of Kyoto.

Arashiyama itself is a charming, quaint, and quiet district, full of traditional shops, restaurants, and guesthouses. It's popular due to its proximity to nature, making it a nice place for Kyoto locals to go on the weekend when they want to get out of the city.

Perhaps Arashiyama's most famous attraction is the Sagano Bamboo Forest, also known as the Arashiyama Bamboo Grove.

The bamboo grove is more than just a forest. It's also considered to be one of Japan's National Treasures... though not in the way you might expect. It's not the sight of the beautiful bamboo forest, with its towering shoots soaring into the air that earned the grove national recognition, but its sound.

The sound of the wind blowing through the bamboo grove and the gentle creaking of the bamboo shoots has been recognized by the Ministry of the Environment as a National Soundscape of Japan and an intangible cultural heritage.

We walked through the forest, past groups of kimono-clad women taking photos in front of the bamboo and past hand-pulled rickshaw carts ferrying tourists up and down the shady trails.

In the heart of the bamboo forest is Nonomiya Shrine, historically important in the practice of the ancient court appointment of the Imperial Saiō.

The Saiō was traditionally a young girl of the imperial line, who was chosen to serve as a miko, or shrine maiden, at Ise Jingū, the most important Shinto shrine in the country. They spent a period of up to a year at the shrine undergoing a purification ritual in the tranquil bamboo forest and undertook a pilgrimage back to the shrine at designated times to convey prayers to Amaterasu, the sun goddess from whom the Imperial House of Japan are said to be descended, who is enshrined within.

Their position was one of great honor and importance. The Saiō was the High Priestess of Ise Shrine and the spiritual representative of the imperial family.

When an emperor died or abdicated, the Saiō was recalled to the capital to rejoin the imperial court, and a new Saiō was chosen. As the Saiō was usually a young child when she was chosen, she was still typically in her twenties when she returned to the court and resumed her royal life. Marrying a former Saiō was considered to be a great honor, and women who had served as the Saiō typically gained positions of great power and prominence within the imperial court.

Today, the shrine is very popular with women, particularly those praying for a happy marriage and healthy children. 

As we left the shrine, Mom and I made our way along the trail, down the winding pathways leading back to the river. It was very quiet here. All of the tourists, just like at Fushimi Inari, seemed to cluster around the entrance to the grove, taking their pictures with the bamboo. It was very crowded when we entered the grove, but after walking for 10 or 15 minutes, it felt like we had the place entirely to ourselves.

Soon, we had made our way down to the river. It was getting late, and we were beginning to become tired. We called a taxi to take us back into town.

But we didn't go directly back to our hotel; not quite yet! We had to make one more stop in Kyoto first.

Our taxi dropped us off in front of Kameya Kiyonaga, a 400-year-old sweet shop located in the historical geisha district of Gion. It is the only shop remaining in the old imperial capital that continues to make Kyoto's oldest traditional sweet.

The shop was established in 1617 and quickly made a name for itself as one of Kyoto's finest confectioners. By the late 19th century, Kameya Kiyonaga was so prestigious that it was named just one of 28 shops in all of Japan permitted to present sweets to the emperor.

Today, the shop makes and sells a small variety of traditional Japanese sweets, but they are most famous for their seijō-kankidan, a type of fried dumpling known as "edible incense".

Seijō-kankidan, also known as danki, or “ball of joy”, has roots reaching back to the Nara period (710–794), when Japan adopted deep-fried pastries from Tang China. Yet the sweet’s origins lie even farther west in India, where its ancestor, modak, is still made for the deity Ganesha during the Ganesh Chaturthi Festival.

Carried across Asia via the Silk Road and preserved in Japanese Buddhist tradition, this confection is now extremely rare, but Kameya Kiyonaga continues to make it using an ancient recipe passed down from generation to generation over hundreds of years. The little parcels of rice-flour dough are filled with a red bean paste kneaded to incorporate seven kinds of incense and deep-fried in sesame oil.

We bought two of the edible incense, along with a handful of other traditional Japanese sweets, then headed back to our hotel room to sample them alongside a cup of tea.

The edible incense had a very crispy and hard exterior, but the inside was super soft. The filling was sweet and definitely tasted the way that incense smells. I could for sure get notes of sandalwood, cinnamon, and camphor. I'm not entirely sure what the other four ingredients are, but they were definitely very strong and aromatic. I liked the sweets, but maybe more for the novelty than for anything else.

After finishing our edible incense, we moved on to the next sweet. Next, we tried kyo-oboro, a thin, soft, and chewy white miso and sugar flavored wafer cracker.

Next up was kuran, a crispy red bean biscuit.

After that, we tried kuri-kuri, a chestnut paste bun with sesame seeds. The chestnut paste was thick and smooth and had an excellent texture. It wasn't overly sweet, which I liked.

Finally, we tried the yokan, a brown sugar cake with walnut. Of all of the sweets we had, it was probably my favorite. It was rich and sweet, and the texture of the walnuts gave the otherwise soft and chewy cake a nice crunch.

That night, we were exhausted! It had probably been our busiest day in Japan so far, and we were ready for an early evening.