Living on the north side of Kyoto

We live in the northeast corner of Kyoto City, sort of in a notch between two hills that pinches off a neat corner and marks a threshhold between "up here" and "down there." If you walk 10 minutes SOUTH from my house, you'lll find Kitayama (northern mountains) Street. If you walk 5 minutes north, you'll be on the twisting mountain road to Ohara.

The office where I do editing work is about 4km south, about 20 minutes by bicycle, but there is something interesting about that small distance. About 3 km down is a major east-west street called Imadegawa, which is where the fabled Kamo River and the somewhat less-fabled Takano River meet on their way into town from the aforementioned "northern mountains." North of this confluence, say Kyotoites, the temperature is always a few degrees cooler than it is to the south, even though the terrain is only gently sloping up toward the north.

I was reminded of this today as I rode the train home in the rain, a 10-minute trip. As we moved north over this short distance, the rain became sleet, and then snow as we reached my station. (Not a station, actually, just a platform. This is a rural route.) I remembered that I had seen this phenomenon several times before, raining south of Imadegawa, snowing to the north.

This is even better in summer. Kyoto is sometimes referred to as the bottom of a cooking pot, because it is a basin, and gets terribly hot in summer. Up here it is just a few degrees cooler, and we have a cool wind coming down from Mt. Hiei, so that we get a crossbreeze upstairs from front to back, and almost never need to use our air conditioner at night in summer, unlike the people downtown.