Gion, Jetavana, Yasaka

In Kyoto, the Gion (祇園) district is the old entertainment area of town. In my mind, it’s the place where tourists would go to try to get a glimpse of a geisha or, more likely, a maiko. There’s the famous Gion Matsuri that’s one of the largest festivals in Japan every year.

Something I didn’t know until looking it up today was that the word Gion is derived from the Buddhist term Jetavana:

Jetavana was the place where the Buddha gave the majority of his teachings and discourses

In Chinese, Jetavana is spelled 祇樹給孤獨園, and that long name got abbreviated into just the first and last characters: 祇園 (Gion).

The main shrine in Gion was originally called Gion Shrine (祇園社 or 祇園神社). During the Meiji era, Buddhism was a four-letter word, so the shrine got renamed to Yasaka Shrine (八坂神社), which stuck, but the neighborhood still kept being called Gion. And thus, we have the Gion district with the Yasaka shrine.

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