Buddhists cry blasphemy at plan to run bullet train under Kyoto

Kyoto and Japan’s bullet trains are caught in a clash between the ancient and the modern.

A bullet train passes below Mount Fuji. Picture: iStock

Even for those who have never visited Japan, the city of Kyoto and the bullet train are symbols of the country and its culture.

The shinkansen, as it is known, runs from one end of the country to the other on a network of unmatched speed and efficiency.

Kyoto, meanwhile, with its traditional arts and its temples, shrines and palaces, is a living museum. But now these two symbols are caught in a clash between the ancient and the modern.

The conflict centres on a plan to build a track from the town of Tsuruga to Osaka, which would stop at Kyoto and pass under the city in a 40m-deep tunnel. To its proponents, it is a sensible move that will bring convenience and prosperity to all.

But it has excited alarm among a powerful group of Buddhist priests. Leaders of the Kyoto Buddhist Association have denounced it as a “blasphemy” that threatens the soul of the city.

The clash has pitted an arch conservative politician and the 93-year old abbot of one of Kyoto’s great temples against one another.

The former is Shoji Nishida, 66, a member of the upper house of parliament for the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, who is leading the push to build the new line. The LDP has traditionally promoted infrastructure, bringing business to construction companies, which in turn support its candidates.

Mr Nishida, however, says the motive for building the new line is to prepare for the potential of an earthquake and tsunami originating in an undersea fault called the Nankai Trough. Such a disaster could disrupt the link between Tokyo and Osaka, making it urgent, in Mr Nishida’s view, to make an alternative route.

The problem is that Kyoto, which is not at acute risk from the future earthquake, would have to pay a third of the projected cost, at up to 3.9 trillion yen ($41bn).

Many argue that well-connected Kyoto does not need another train line. Instead the money should be spent on improvement of bus and subway services that have been stretched by an influx of tourists.

Mr Nishida says he will prevail upon the central government to meet the whole bill, but that will not satisfy his most outspoken opponent, Tainen Miyagi, the head of Shogo-in, a 935-year old temple.

For Mr Miyagi, it is not an argument about money but about human arrogance in the face of the natural world. “When nature is tainted by the hand of men, it is impossible to return it to its pristine state.”

Local anxiety focuses on the city’s water supply. Many of Kyoto’s most valued historic industries depend on it: from dyeing the silks that make kimono to sake brewing.

Shrines and temples depend on water too, for their purification rituals and offerings. The city’s brewers and confectioners had grumbled about the plan, but the temples, led by Mr Miyagi, helped the campaign to take off.

The temples have organised a petition and Mr Miyagi has lobbied the mayor of the city and the governor of Kyoto prefecture, who have both begun hinting at doubts about the project.

The resistance infuriates Mr Nishida, who says opponents fail to understand the science of how the new line will be engineered.

His frustration expresses itself in personal invective against Mr Miyagi, whom he accuses of being a “left-wing person” and, bizarrely, a supporter of Pol Pot, the leader of Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge revolutionaries.

Mr Miyagi chuckles to hear such claims. He has visited Cambodia as a Buddhist priest but has no time for the man who carried out a genocide in the 1970s. “Mr Nishida,” he says, “is expressing his desperation.”

THE TIMES