Kyoto, in Sound • Episode 06
A podcast series which asks the people who live in this city to talk about their favourite sounds.
Happy New Year! I hope you all managed to find at least a little bit of quiet amongst the inevitable mad rush of the holidays.
Usually, for Kyoto, in Sound episodes, I’m out interviewing the residents of this city about their favourite sounds. But this week, everyone is busy eating osechi and having family time.
So in this first episode of 2026 I’d like to share one of my favourite sounds instead. It’s a sound that only happens once a year, but it stays with you for far longer.
I’m talking about Joya no Kane—the ringing of the temple bell on New Year’s Eve. It’s a ritual that I took part in every year back when I lived in Tokyo from 2017 to 2020. We’d travel back to Kyoto on the Shinkansen to visit family around New Year’s and it was then that I fell in love with this midnight tradition.
In Buddhism, we are said to have 108 bonnō (worldly desires/anxieties). So, the bell is rung 108 times to banish them, one by one, leaving you with a clean slate for the year ahead. It sounds like a pretty sweet deal to be honest: ring a bell and be done with jealousy and addiction etc!
In this episode, I tried to capture that feeling of “reset.” It’s a bit of a journey; starting with the stark, windy silence of a 10km solo walk from Jojakko-ji, moving through to the sacred quiet of Shoren-in with a friend, and ending up at the bell itself.
If you’re feeling a bit burned out from the festive season, this one is for you. It’s an intentionally slow and quiet episode.
And if you’d like to experience the sounds of Kyoto in person this year, my booking calendar for guided sound walks is open at www.kyotoinsound.com.
Here’s to a great year ahead. Thank you for listening,
SJF
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