The Arashiyama Bamboo Grove is a corridor of giant bamboo on the western edge of Kyoto, and Japan protects it for the noise it makes. In 1996 the environment ministry put the sound of this grove on its national list of a hundred soundscapes. The plant is mōsō, the largest bamboo in the country, and the culms run twenty metres up and are hollow all the way. That is the whole point: they knock against each other like blocks of wood, the tallest creak as they lean, and the leaves rush somewhere high overhead. In spring the new shoots climb almost a metre a day. Those same shoots are a delicacy, lifted with a long hoe before they break the soil and turn bitter, so every towering culm here is simply a shoot that somebody left to grow on. From where you stand in the middle of the path they line up in perspective until the corridor seems to close far ahead, under a ceiling of leaves that turns the daylight green.
The path through the grove is a public lane, free and never shut, which is exactly what makes the early visit possible. Before seven the path is close to empty, the bamboo still holds the cool of the night, and the loudest thing is your own footsteps on the fallen leaves. A few steps off the lane stands Nonomiya, the small shrine where unmarried princesses of the imperial house lived apart for a year or more before leaving to serve the gods at Ise. Its torii is cut from unstripped timber, still rough with bark. That shrine is why there is a path here at all. The bamboo itself keeps a longer clock. A grove spreads underground as one plant repeated, flowers perhaps once in a human lifetime after sixty to 120 years of growing nothing but leaves, and then dies together. What you do in the meantime is stop walking, let a group get ahead, and wait for a gust — because by nine the corridor is shoulder to shoulder and there is nothing left for you to hear.