🇯🇵 Kyoto

Overview

Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for over a thousand years, from 794 until the court moved to Tokyo in 1868, and it remains the country's cultural treasury: about 1.5 million residents, some 1,600 Buddhist temples, 400 Shinto shrines and seventeen UNESCO World Heritage sites. The city was famously spared the bombing that levelled other Japanese cities in WWII, so its wooden machiya houses and garden temples are largely the real thing. The grid plan is borrowed from ancient Chinese capitals, which makes it one of Japan's easiest cities to navigate — and its geisha district, Gion, is a living tradition, not a theme park.

Temples & shrines

Sixteen hundred temples means you must choose. The classics are classics for a reason — the trick is arriving before the buses do.

• Fushimi Inari at dawn — Ten thousand vermilion torii gates tunnelling up a sacred mountain. At 6am you share them with joggers and foxes; by 10 it's a conga line. The full loop takes two hours and empties dramatically past the halfway viewpoint.
• Kinkaku-ji & Ginkaku-ji — The Golden Pavilion floating on its mirror pond is Kyoto's postcard; the Silver Pavilion — never actually silvered — answers with raked sand gardens and restraint. Seeing both in one day is a lesson in two Japanese aesthetics.
• Kiyomizu-dera & the Higashiyama lanes — The great wooden stage juts over a valley of maples, with the preserved Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka lanes cascading below. Sunset from the stage, then downhill for tea, is the classic Kyoto evening.
• Arashiyama bamboo grove & beyond — The swaying green corridor is brief and busy; the reason to come is everything around it — Tenryū-ji's garden, the river at Togetsukyō bridge, and the monkey park's hilltop view. Arrive by 8am or accept the crowds with grace.

Things to do

• The Philosopher's Path — A canal-side walk between Ginkaku-ji and Nanzen-ji named for a professor who did his thinking here daily. Transcendent under April cherry blossoms, quietly lovely the rest of the year.
• Nishiki Market — 'Kyoto's kitchen': five covered blocks of pickles, tofu doughnuts, knives and skewered everything. Eat standing where you buy — walking while eating is frowned on — and leave room for a matcha soft-serve.
• An evening in Gion — Lantern-lit Hanamikoji street and the Shirakawa canal at dusk, when geiko and maiko hurry to appointments. Watch respectfully from a distance — no chasing, no flash — and consider a seasonal dance performance for the real thing on stage.
• Tea ceremony or zazen — Several teahouses and temples open their rituals to visitors: an hour of whisked matcha and deliberate movement, or seated meditation with a monk who will straighten your posture. The slowness is the souvenir.

Gastronomy

Neighborhoods