Uji's Cultural Landscape

A Town That Became a Cultural Property

On 12 February 2009, the riverside town of Uji in Kyoto Prefecture was added to Japan's register of cultural properties. What was recorded was not a temple or a single building, but a stretch of inhabited ground 228.5 hectares in size: streets, houses, tea fields, two rivers, a bridge, and the wooded hills behind them. Uji became the first city in Japan to be selected as an Important Cultural Landscape.

That category itself was new. A 2004 revision of the Law for the Protection of Cultural Properties created the idea of a "cultural landscape": a place shaped over generations by ordinary work and daily life, and worth protecting as a whole rather than piece by piece. Of the many such landscapes across Japan, the national government selects the most significant as Important Cultural Landscapes. Most early selections were rural valleys, terraced rice fields, and fishing coasts. Uji was the first to be a working town.

The town sits a short distance south of Kyoto, on both banks of the Uji River where it leaves the hills and opens onto the plain. For more than a thousand years that crossing point has carried travellers between Nara and Kyoto, and the layers of that long use are still legible in the streets people walk today.

A Thousand Years Read in the Street Plan

The first bridge across the fast-flowing Uji River was built in the Asuka period, in the seventh century. The town's growth as a settlement, though, began with the Heian-period aristocracy. Drawn by the river scenery and the cool air just outside the capital, court nobles of the Fujiwara family built detached villas here, laying out their estates and garden ponds on a grid of blocks running north-south and east-west.

The most famous of those estates survives. In 1052 Fujiwara no Yorimichi converted his father's villa, known as Uji-dono, into the temple of Byodoin. Its Phoenix Hall, raised the following year above a reflecting pond, was built as a vision of the Buddhist paradise made visible on earth.

When the Northern and Southern Courts went to war in the fourteenth century, the aristocracy lost its grip on Uji. The people who remained reshaped the town for themselves. A new road, today's Ujibashi-dori, was cut diagonally across the older rectangular blocks, and rows of long townhouses rose along it. Archaeologists working in Uji still find the planned land divisions of the late ancient period beneath the modern surface, and the alignment of several present-day streets follows those buried lines.

Tea is the other thread. Cultivation began here in medieval times, and by the late Muromachi period Uji had established itself as the foremost tea-producing district in the country. In the Edo period, master tea producers known as chashi built substantial residences along the main streets, each fronted by a wide nagayamon gate, with the broad plots of former noble estates kept open behind them for tea. By the Meiji era the descendants of those families had become tea merchants, and wholesale shops, retail stores, and small hand-craft processing workshops lined the streets together. Several of those buildings still stand in the town.

Why the Whole Town Was Recognised

A cultural landscape is protected as something that keeps changing. The Japanese term for the approach is "dynamic preservation": the point is not to freeze the town but to identify the parts that carry its essential character and pass those on, while everyday life continues around them.

For Uji, surveys sorted those parts into three strands. The first records the town's growth from the Heian period to the present through its shrines, streets, blocks, and buried archaeology. The second is the river itself, taking in the watercourse, the bridge, the parks, and the houses that frame the scenery, along with the long history of river transport, leisure boating, and the comings and goings across Ujibashi. The third is the tea industry, from the fields where the leaf is grown through the houses and research facilities where it is processed and studied.

From this analysis, 95 individual elements in 13 categories were identified as the components that hold the landscape's value. They include the Uji and Igawa rivers; 53 designated roads, among them Ujibashi-dori, Agata-dori, and Honmachi-dori; 13 shrines and temples, Byodoin and Ujigami Shrine among them; three shopping streets; 14 houses chosen for what they show of tea, tourism, and modernisation; the tea fields of Uji and Shirakawa; Mount Buttoku and Mount Asahi; the Kotozaka slope; Ujibashi; Uji Park; the Kyoto Prefectural Tea Research Institute; and the archaeological sites and street blocks themselves.

What to Look For When You Visit

Start at the bridge. Ujibashi is the natural threshold to the town, and standing at its centre gives you the same broad view of river, hills, and rooftops that has drawn visitors for centuries. The current bridge is modern, but its position and its role in the townscape are old.

Two of Uji's monuments carry a further distinction. Byodoin and Ujigami Shrine are both part of the World Heritage Site known as the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto, inscribed in 1994. They face each other across the river. Byodoin's Phoenix Hall, with its pond and slender wing corridors, remains one of the clearest surviving images of how Heian aristocrats pictured paradise. Ujigami Shrine, set against the hillside on the opposite bank, holds a main hall regarded as the oldest shrine building still standing in Japan; in its grounds a spring called Kirihara-mizu, one of Uji's celebrated waters, still flows.

Walk the approach streets and the tea is impossible to miss. Shops selling Uji tea line the route between the stations and the temples, many of them roasting and grinding on the premises. On the hillsides around the town you may see tea fields shaded by frames of reed or cloth. This covered method of cultivation, developed in Uji, shields the young leaves from direct sun and is what produces the deep colour and gentle flavour of the powdered tea used in the tea ceremony.

Readers of classical literature will recognise the place name. The final ten chapters of The Tale of Genji, written in the early eleventh century, are set in Uji, and the riverbanks here are still associated with the melancholy mood of that closing sequence.

Getting There and Looking Around

Uji is easy to reach from Kyoto. Trains on the JR Nara Line run from Kyoto Station to JR Uji Station in roughly 17 to 20 minutes; the Keihan Uji Line serves Keihan Uji Station on the opposite bank. The Nara Line continues south, so Uji also sits comfortably on a route between Kyoto and Nara.

The core sights are close together and best seen on foot. From Byodoin it is a walk of about ten to fifteen minutes across the river to Ujigami Shrine, and the approach streets in between are lined with tea shops and cafes. By the bridge stands Tsuen, a tea house whose origins are traced to the twelfth century and which appears in later Japanese fiction. For visitors with more time, the temple of Mimurotoji, north of the central area, is known for its hydrangeas in early summer.