Your favorite city sucks
Currently reading: Edo ga Tōkyō ni natta hi 江戸が東京になった日 ("The day Edo became Tokyo"), by Sasaki Suguru 佐々木克. A bit prolix, but it sort of has to be given the fiddliness of the topic: the first question is how to even define the "capital" of a country like Edo-period Japan, ruled as it was through a delicately balanced system of real and figurative power centers by people who were not particularly interested in emerging European nation-state theory.
Anyway, in discussing pre-Meiji attitudes towards Kyoto, he quotes this zinger from a 1781 book entitled Mita Kyō monogatari 見た京物語 ("Kyoto/the capital as I saw it"), by Nishōtei Hanzan 二鐘亭半山, a shogunate functionary from Edo who had recently spent a year and a half in Kyoto gathering material. (Although Hanzan is now better known as a writer, Sasaki notes that he was no mere dilettante — he served in Edo castle and his work was based on a deep understanding of the history of power and politics in Japan.)
京は砂糖漬のやうなる所なり。一体、雅ありて、味に比せば甘し。しかれども、かみしめてむまみなし。からびたるやうにて、潤沢なることなし。きれいなれど、どこやらさびし……花の都は二百年前にて、今は花の田舎なり。田舎にしては花残れり。
Kyō[to]/the capital is like a piece of candied fruit peel: all very elegant and sweet, but if you bite into it there's nothing there. Just a measly little dried-up thing. It's beautiful, but somehow desolate [...] The days of the "capital in bloom" (hana no miyako) were two hundred years ago; now it is a florid backwater (hana no inaka). A backwater, but the blossoms do remain (hana nokoreri).
Burn! The putdown works even better in Japanese, where you can use hana naturally to mean both literal blossoms and figurative flowering.
Also note that it's difficult to say if, when he writes "京", he means it as a proper noun ("Kyoto") or a description ("the capital"); and even if he means the latter, translating it merely as "capital" is potentially misleading to a modern English-speaking reader — that's the point of the whole chapter, really.
Charles:
Ha, I like it. 京 was the first Japanese pun I ever made. I think I was in 2nd year when some exchange students from 京都大学 came to my school for a semester. I kidded one student, "Does your school have a short name? If 東京大学 is 東大 then your school is part of the family, 兄弟 , right?"
She didn't like that at all.