Amusements

Under the heading “Amusements” — the term used in Stray Notes on Kioto (1878) and elsewhere — were grouped a wide variety of activities outside of sightseeing (i.e. heritage sites and areas of natural beauty) and shopping. While cafes, beer halls, and the like were sometimes featured in guides, theatre performances, festivals, and geisha-related events were the most frequently recommended in the case of Kyoto. 

As Stray Notes (45) advised, “to visit these and understand them the traveller must place himself in the hands of some one who knows the town and has some acquittance with the language.” For most short-term visitors, this entailed employing a local guide. 

Tourist complaints about entertainment

Tourists often complained about the poor quality of entertainment facilities across Japan and, especially into the 1930s, entertainment — particularly evening activities — became a target of reform among tourism bureaucrats, though with only limited success. Board of Tourist Industry reports noted the unsuitability of dance halls for female tourists, the lack of casinos, and the early closing time of cinemas as common problems. 

As the quote below suggests, Kyoto — to some extent — was secured against complaints about entertainment facilities because of the pleasure that many tourists took in simply wandering around the streets at night, the many festivals, and the long-running diversity and richness of nightlife in the city (whatever their limited access, in practice). That said, Kabuki and Noh performances, to which many visitors were taken in both Tokyo and Kyoto especially, were often criticized as overlong and boring.

The rest of this page picks up theatre, geisha-related events, festivals and other activities that provided entertainment for inbound tourists in Kyoto at different moments over the 1872–1941 period.

Theatre

In addition to the Minami-za (南座), located at Shijō–Kawabata (as today, though in a different building), foreign tourists were typically directed to Shinkyōgoku to watch the theatre or, at least, soak up the atmosphere. A new addition to Kyoto, established in 1872, Shinkyōgoku was often called “Theatre Street” in English-language guidebooks. 

“This street,” wrote Aisaburo Akiyama, ”is full of theatres, music-halls, cinematographs, storytellers’ halls and all kinds of shows, being interspersed by a lot of restaurants. It is a favourite resort of holiday-makers and is particularly lively at night because it is illuminated as bright as daylight. A stroll after dinner is always found delightful” (1937, 96).

Some of the recommended theatres in Shinkyōgoku were the Meiji-za (明治座), Kabuki-za (歌舞伎座), and Ebisu-za (夷谷座), though it contained numerous smaller vaudeville theatres (yose 寄席) as well. 

Travelogues describing a visit to the theatre in Kyoto are not uncommon, but writers often report finding themselves the centre of attention or becoming quickly confused about what was happening on stage. In the end, advised An Official Guide to Eastern Asia (1914, 191), foreign visitors might find the Miyako Odori (see below) “the most attractive of these [theatre] performances.”

Geisha-related entertainment

From the mid-1870s, the word "geisha" began to appear in Western accounts of Japan. Terms like "entertainers," "singing and posturing girls," and dancing girls were, however, still used in literature for tourists into the 1880s and beyond, and confusion and misrepresentations about the roles and functions of geisha continued (into, arguably, the present day) (cf. Hockley 2004).

From the very beginning of inbound tourism to Kyoto, geisha were used to entertain visitors and promote the city. For the 1872 Kyoto Exhibition, the Kamogawa Odori (Pontochō hanamachi) and the Miyako Odori (Gion hanamachi) were started, as part of measures to attract more tourists. Among the many stands and various events put on for visitors, including firework displays, sumo, and Noh performances, the Miyako Odori was judged to be the most popular (Okada 2010). The following year, it opened in a specially-built new theatre, the Kaburenjō (歌舞練場) in Gion. Although Satow and Hawes' 1881 Handbook paid little attention to Kyoto's hanamachi, geisha or the dances, by the 1891 third edition, now published by John Murray, tourists were advised that "no one visiting Kyōto at the proper season should fail to see the Miyako-odori, a kind of ballet" (288). 

As Mariko Okada (2010) explains, in choreography, scripts, and seating options (i.e. chairs), these dances represented a new form of performance and a new public presence for the geisha — and, for organizers in the city, were "directed by the sense of being international" (37). Nevertheless, the geisha dances soon came to typify the charming traditions that survived in the "old capital."

Many travelogues carried references to the Miyako Odori, but a particularly full description was provided in Dragons and Cherry Blossoms (1896), by Mrs Robert C. Morris. 

In addition to attending one of the annual dances, tourists could take a mid-morning tour of the "Geisha School" (Yasaka Nyokōba 八坂女紅馬), an educational facility established during the modernization of Gion underway from the 1870s. This tour could be booked through one's hotel, and allowed visitors to watch students learning "dancing, music, tea ceremonials, floral arrangement, calligraphy, etc." ("Guide to Kyoto" 1914, 14).   

However, a perhaps more-valorized way of experiencing Kyoto's geisha culture was to visit a tea house for a private dance. English-language guidebooks, however, were mostly unforthcoming about how to organize this. There was nothing about tea houses in the Murray's series, its fulsome praise of the Miyako Odori not withstanding; while T. Philip Terry warned readers off early, in the introduction to his Japanese Empire (1914, clxi) — "Foreigners usually find geisha entertainments painfully destitute of interest or excitement."

But for other guidebook writers, and countless travelogue authors (see one example below), an encounter with a geisha held obvious exotic appeal. 

Stray Notes on Kioto (1878), after a fairly dry section listing the taxes paid by the "about 500 dancing and singing girls in Kioto" and the tea houses, suggested the possibility of "penetrat[ing]" still further "into the mysteries of Kioto civilisation" with a visit to the Shimabara hanamachi: "The writer has been informed that if the particular damsel who is being 'interviewed' (and who maintains a strict silence) should happen to honor one of the interviewers with a whiff from her pipe, it is to be regarded as a mark of great condescension and special favor" (45). 

In Kirtland Lucian Swift's guidebook Finding the Worth While in the Orient (1926, 67–68), "a dinner at some famous tea house with a geisha-dance to entertain one's eyes if not one's ears" is presented as one of the main "diversions and pleasant distractions" to be found in Kyoto.  

Also, as this advertisement for a Kyoto tea house shows, local businesses played an active role in responding to, and helping shape, tourist desires for firsthand encounters with geisha in Kyoto.

The Miyako Hotel's Guide to Kyoto (1906) suggests that an evening at a tea house was not hard to organize, at least for its guests, but could be expensive, even considering the relative wealth of most Western tourists in Japan.

"Private geisha dances can be got up at any time to be held in one of the tea-houses," the guide explained. "They are rather expensive luxuries, but three or four guests often club together, share the cost, and get more fun out it than would be possible alone." In a notable shift from the erotic allure conveyed in the quote from Stray Notes above, which was presumably directed at male readers, the Miyako Hotel also noted that "Ladies can attend any of these dances without the slightest fear of seeing or hearing anything undesirable" (24–25).

For in-depth analysis of the changing roles and image of geisha in Kyoto from 1918–1941, see Gavin James Campbell's unit on Modern Kyoto, Modern Geisha.

Festivals (matsuri)

Recommending, or deciding, the best time to tour Japan was a complicated business. As well as the "climate" and the seasonal flowers, "the picturesque festivals that are always a delight to the stranger" were an important criteria (Terry 1914, p. lix). Kyoto, in particular, was praised as "a city of festivals" (403). 

As well as the Miyako Odori (April), the Aoi festival (May), and the Gion festival (July) — often described as the festivities most distinctive of Kyoto — guidebooks by both foreign writers and Japanese tourism providers typically provided lists of the city's annual events, month by month. These included festivals celebrated nationally and local events, for example, the Tayū Dōchū procession of high-ranking courtesans (April) and the Daimonji fire-lighting at the close of Obon (August).

In addition to guidebooks, an important role in helping visitors understand the big festivals was played by Kyoto's Western-style hotels, which provided on-the-spot guidance, distributed explanatory literature and, in the case of the Miyako Hotel, constructed "temporary stands along the main route of the processions for the convenience of foreign guests" (Terry 1914, 403). 

Guidebooks produced by the city tended to list a greater range of annual events than guides to Japan as a whole, including, for example, the "Cow Festival" (Ushi matsuri 牛祭) at Kōryūji temple in Uzumasa (October). 

As guidebooks and travellers alike proclaimed, Kyoto was a city in which, whatever the month, it seemed like some kind of festivity could be enjoyed. Nevertheless, some periods were less vibrant than others. Reflecting on the 2nd Oriental Tourism Conference (Dai Ni Kai Tōa Kankō Kaigi), held in Kyoto in October 1939, Kyoto City Tourism Bureau head Ōkura Shigetō (大倉重藤) expressed his disappointment that international guests were not able to "experience one of the exceptional annual events that symbolize Kyoto, and instead had to make do with mushroom hunting (kinoko-gari きのこ狩り)" (Ōkura 1939, 11).

Sumo

Sumo is not strongly associated with Kyoto in the modern period; and the city is not an official basho in the professional national tournament. But Kirtland (1926, 67–68), for example, listed it as one of the many "diversions and pleasant distractions of Kyoto."

Sumo could be watched, along with theatre and motion pictures, on Shinkyōgoku and also as part of the festivities surrounding the "shōkonsai" (招魂祭, rituals for the dead) at Kyoto's Reizan Kansai Shōkonsha (霊山官祭招魂社) shrine, renamed Kyōto Ryōzen Gokoku Shrine (霊山護国神社) in 1939. These rituals had been revived after 1868, at the new Shōkon shrines built to consecrate those who had died for the nation during the civil war that led up to the Meiji Restoration. In guidebooks about the latter, sumo was sometimes noted as an attraction of the shrine.

Records of visits to both these "wrestling" —  as sumo was usually termed — events are given below.

That the sumo performances on Shinkyōgoku were being marketed at foreigners as well as Japanese passers-by is suggested by the sign over the door: "'ten sen to foreign spectators'," according to Lilla Rideal (1920, 28), who visited Kyoto on a postwar trip by Trans-Siberian train and steamer from London to various countries in "the East."

Beer halls

Beer typically got a special mention in guidebook series. In the earliest edition of what became the Murray's Handbook for Travellers in Japan, Satow and Hawes advised that travellers heading into the interior should "take their own wines. [But g]ood beer is sometimes to be had" (1881, p. xvii). Ten years later, in the 3rd edition, Chamberlain and Mason were able to write that "beer is to be met with in most towns, excellent beer being now brewed both at Yokohama (Kirin Beer) and at Tōkyō (Yebisu Beer)" (1891, 9). Asahi beer, brewed in Osaka, was also available from 1889, as well as Sapporo beer (est. 1876) and "Munchener" (München) beer (from 1910). In general, though, "Beware of spurious imitations," warned the 5th edition (1899, 10).   

The importance of beer for tourists is suggested in guidebook language sections as well. After informing readers how to inquire about room availability at inns and hotels, the Murray's Handbook assumed travellers' next question may have been about the availability of beer. Phrases later in the same section, such as "Please cool the beer" and "That is not [cool] enough," point to a commonly-voiced complaint among visitors (1901, 28–33).  

In Kyoto, its location outside the treaty limits notwithstanding, beer was easily available from an early point through the Western-style hotels and, later, import food and drink stores like Meidi-ya.

The beer hall (bia hōru, from German bierhalle), a place to drink Japanese beer in German-style glass tankards while sitting at long tables, was popularized in Kyoto from an early point as well (cf. Francks 2009). Japan's first beer hall, it is said, was a temporary stand by Osaka Beer at the 4th National Industrial Exhibition, which was held in Kyoto in 1895. 

More permanent establishments were opened from the turn of the century in Kyoto, along with Osaka and Tokyo, and some guidebooks recommended these to readers. 

The Miyako Hotel suggested that, following an evening navigating Shinkyōgoku (see above), tourists might relax in more familiar surroundings: "one could do worse than drop in at the Asahi Beer Hall and watch the people crossing Shijo Bridge and those sitting in the tea-house overlooking the river" (1906, 101– 2). In its "Guide to Kyoto" in Tsūrisuto (Dec. 1914), Japan Tourist Bureau recommended the "Yaomasa" and "Matsutaketei" beer halls (11). The former, a Western-style food restaurant, was located at the south-west corner of Shijō bridge, opposite the Asahi Beer Hall; the Matsutaketei could be found close to Doshisha on Imadegawa, west of Karasuma street.

None of this is to suggest that beer was only, or even primarily, produced for resident foreigners or inbound tourists. Although relatively expensive at first, with consumption mainly among the military and political elite, beer was on its way to becoming a "mass market product" by the turn of the century (Francks 2009). By 1914, as Terry's Japanese Empire noted, beer "is now almost as much the national drink of Japan as it is Germany" (1914, lxxiv).