To be honest, I'm not sure why I thought of cello and violin on this song. I originally planned to have an upright bass played arco on it too, but that never materialized. Which is better, I like that the cello has the first verse and the violin takes over on the second. I think I wanted to capture the ancient nature of Kyoto, and to western ears, string instruments are the essence of classicism.

The first verse references Kinkaku-ji or the Golden Temple, Golden Pavilion, etc. It's a real temple in Kyoto with a second story covered almost entirely in pure gold leaf. It's surrounded by a moat and inaccessible to the general public, but it's a huge tourist attraction. The temple was built by a damyo who retired and became something of a religious figure for the later part of his life. The building and the grounds surrounding were/are considered very sacred. However, in the 1950s, after the temple (along with most of kyoto) survived WWII, the temple was set ablaze in the middle of the night. It was destroyed, and soon it was discovered that a monk positioned at the temple was to blame. I don't know if any official reason was ever revealed, but it was subject to much speculation. Most famously, Yukio Mishima wrote a book called "The Temple Of The Golden Pavilion" about the incident. In it a child with obsessive visions of the temple becomes a monk there, and as the moral depravity of the city tortures him mentally, he seeks to destroy the temple with a glorious fire. Upon seeing the thing swarmed with tourists, gawking and littering, something quite uncommon in Japan, I thought the monk might have been trying to save the temple from becoming a sideshow–a hollow artifact to be consumed by absent minded visitors instead of
revered for its beauty by those seeking divine inspiration. So that's what I wrote about.

Fun fact: the cover of the album here is from a photo I took of Kinkaku-Ji when we visited it on tour in 2017. You can see the golden temple in the reflection of the water.

The nightingales mentioned in the song is a reference to Nijo Castle, a preserved castle from the 1600s. Its floors feature a unique security measure: when weight is applied to the floorboards in the form of a footstep, the floorboards squeak and chirp like nightingales. This is so that if anyone is sneaking around in the castle, they can be heard by anyone in any of the many rooms.

The strings in the opening are playing the melody from the chorus of "Hiroshima" heard later on the album and there's a quick musical nod to Nintendo, as Kyoto is where the company is headquartered.