On October 22nd, Kyoto walks through its own memory. The Jidai Matsuri—the Festival of the Ages—is a procession of some two thousand people that moves in reverse through eleven centuries, beginning with the soldiers of the Meiji Restoration and ending, hours later, in the Heian court of 794. Fifes and drums pass first. Then samurai on horseback. Then court ladies in twelve-layered silk, poets, tea merchants, oxcarts. Every costume has been researched and woven to period accuracy, which is why locals call the whole thing a walking museum. The festival is young by Kyoto standards. It began in 1895, when the city—wounded by the emperor's move to Tokyo—built the Heian Shrine to mark 1,100 years since the capital's founding, and staged a parade to remind itself, and everyone else, what it had been. Pride, dressed as pageantry. The procession leaves the old Imperial Palace grounds at noon and takes about two hours to pass any given point on its way to Heian Shrine. Oike-dori and Karasuma-dori offer room to stand; paid seating along the route can be booked ahead. If it rains, everything moves to the following day. That same night, in the mountain village of Kurama north of the city, an entirely different festival—fire, not silk—takes over. Some travelers do both in one day: the ages by daylight, the flames after dark.