Banyan Tree Higashiyama in Kyoto, Japan, designed by architect Kengo Kuma, is nestled within a bamboo forest

Nov 14, 2024 – 5.00am

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My luggage is in the boot and I’m in the back seat when my translation app spits the dummy. For reasons unknown, it suddenly can’t produce the kanji characters that my non-English-speaking taxi driver needs to reach my hotel from Kyoto Station.

Stalemate. Not only is Banyan Tree Higashiyama Kyoto the Singaporean company’s first hotel in Japan, it’s new, and enveloped by a bamboo forest on the lower slopes of Kyoto’s eastern mountains, so the taxi drivers don’t know about it. A phone number is finally sourced – hooray for the global ubiquity of digits! – and we head for the famed feudal-era ward of Higashiyama.

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