Kyoto's secret women's business By JANE WOOLDRIDGE Tuesday 20 March 2001 A FLUTTER of peach silk catches the eye. There, in a slim alley leading from a jumble of century-old wooden buildings to a row of glitzy nightclubs, a young woman in an elaborate kimono toddles on high wooden sandals. A brief pause and then the heavily adorned hair and flowing ends of her sash disappear into a doorway. It's a ``maiko'', a young apprentice geisha, making her way to an appointment or perhaps a class. A ``maiko'', in the middle of the afternoon! Even in the famed geisha district of Gion, glimpses of these mysterious white-faced women are uncommon. Sure, you sometimes see women wrapped in kimonos. But the untutored eye can readily mistake any woman in a kimono for the elegant, traditional entertainers earning the equivalent of $1750 or more for an hour of artful conversation. The maiko, though, are unmistakable, with their white-painted faces, geometrically arranged hair, bright embroidered kimono wrapped with a sash - called an obi - left long and loose in the back. Like countless other Westerners, I've been lured to Kyoto by the magic of Arthur Golden's bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha. Its images of strange and grace-filled rituals, studied gardens and fanciful pavilions and rivalries among beauties in a temptingly taboo cosmos of desire and discretion proved irresistible. For me, as for most of the city's annual 400,000 foreign visitors, there's little chance of meeting a geisha: they entertain only men and command an exorbitant fee. But the world they symbolise persists in lilting roofs and intricate gardens, on stages and in crafts shops and the rambling wooden inns of Kyoto, Japan's most traditional city. Make no mistake: Kyoto is no museum piece. This is a modern metropolis with a swift underground metro and people scurrying everywhere. Roadside vending machines sell beer, sodas, even liquor. Bullet trains end their 150kmh journeys beneath the sweeping metallic arches of the ultra-modern depot. But, where Tokyo is a frenzied and lustful heavy-metal blue chord, Kyoto is a delicate, deliberate haiku in praise of things past. Brooks, rock gardens and ancient forests cloak stately pagodas and centuries -old rambling temple complexes, intentionally spared by American bombs in World War II. In traditional shopping districts, two-storey wooden buildings spill down sloping cobbled lanes lined with reedy weeping willows. Curved roofs and canopies shaped like arched eyebrows float atop monuments. Studied green spaces appear in front of inns, homes, tiny shrines and traditional cemeteries that are tucked between the borders of burgeoning neighborhoods. No building is supposed to stretch above the peaks of the temples on the hills ringing the city. Immersing yourself in Kyoto's past is as simple as a walk in the park or through a jumble of historic shops in the Higashiyama area. For school children on field trips and visitors with limited time, temples and museums provide an easy entry into the Kyoto that was. There are dozens of them, from the palatial Heian Shrine - a complex of curlicue green roofs erected in 1895 to mark the 1100th anniversary of Kyoto - to tiny Buddhist or Shinto temples tucked amid greenery, shops and homes. Permission from a special government office is required to visit the Imperial Palace, where enthronements and other ceremonies are still held; unfortunately, visitors are allowed in few buildings. The Chion-in Temple, built in 1234, features the largest bell in the nation; the strong arms of 17 monks are needed to ring the 74-tonne gong during New Year ceremonies. The Kinkaku-ji (Golden) Temple re-creates a 14th-century villa destroyed by a fanatic in 1950. The 15th-century Ginkaku-ji (Silver) Temple rests amid pines and carefully raked stone arrangements. The original plan to cover it in silver was never completed. The 17th-century Nijo Castle stands in homage of the age of shoguns, a sprawling wooden structure amid ponds and trees, with its so-called Nightingale Floor, a squeaky hallway designed to warn the feudal lord of intruders. But if your curiosity extends beyond monuments and gardens, Kyoto offers distinctive entrees into its cultural past: performances of kabuki and other traditional arts; private ``cultural introduction'' lessons in flower arranging, calligraphy, origami or dance; respites in traditional inns called ryokans; and even the opportunity to dress up like a geisha. An English-language walking tour led by Johnny Hillwalker - his Japanese name is Hajime Horoka - is popular because it stops in places that few tourists see: less-visited temples and shrines and historic gardens, crafts workshops, cemeteries and boutiques selling intricately designed sweets. Thanks to the Women's Association of Kyoto, you can take a class in a private home, learning to arrange flowers, wear a kimono, prepare a Japanese meal in traditional style, fold origami or spend an afternoon perusing antique shops with a local. An after-dinner stroll leads past a Shinto shrine, glimmering in lantern light, and over a small brook, teeming with koi and sheltered by weeping willows. The next lane leads into a busy night scene: trolling limos, hostesses beckoning businessmen into slick nightclubs and by-the-hour girls in their high-heeled elevator boots and miniskirts, cell phones slung round their necks.