Manshu-in sits a couple of hundred meters up the hill from Shisen-do, in the same quiet stretch of northern Sakyo-ku, and it shares a similar problem: almost nobody who visits Kyoto for the first time puts it on their list. That’s a shame, because Manshu-in is a genuine monzeki temple, meaning it was historically run…
Shisen-do sits in a quiet residential pocket of northern Sakyo-ku, far enough from the main temple circuit that most first-time visitors to Kyoto never hear its name. That’s more or less the appeal for the people who do find it: a small garden built by a retired samurai as his own home, still quiet enough…
Most visitors who spend an afternoon in Gion walk straight past Kenninji without realizing it’s there. It sits at the quiet southern end of Hanamikoji, the same street lined with teahouses and, some evenings, a hurrying maiko or two, but the temple itself doesn’t compete with any of that. It’s the oldest Zen temple in…
Kyoto’s best-known festivals tend to be the ones with the biggest floats or the longest costume parades. Zuiki Matsuri doesn’t compete on either front, and that’s part of what makes it worth catching if you’re in the city in early October. Held at Kitano Tenmangu, the shrine dedicated to the scholar-deity Sugawara no Michizane, it’s…
Most visitors to this corner of northwest Kyoto get off the bus, walk straight to Ryoan-ji for the rock garden, and call it a day. That skips over Ninna-ji, which sits just up the road and has a real claim to the neighborhood: it was the temple of a retired emperor, its five-story pagoda has…
Most of Kyoto’s famous maple views are things you can see any day the temple’s open. Rurikoin isn’t one of them. This small temple in the Yase valley, at the foot of Mount Hiei, keeps its doors shut to the public for most of the year and opens only for a handful of weeks in…
Most people who make it out to Kinkaku-ji never go the extra fifteen minutes further north into Takagamine, a quiet residential foothill neighborhood where the crowds and gift shops fall away. That’s a shame, because Takagamine is where Genko-an sits: a small Zen temple known for exactly two things, a pair of windows cut into…
Most of Kyoto’s sights are centuries old. This one is different: a working film backlot dressed up as an Edo-period town, where staged samurai duels and ninja acrobatics happen a few times a day, and where an actual TV crew might be shooting a scene a few streets over from where you’re eating shaved ice….
Most of Kyoto’s best-known temples sit inside the city, a short walk or bus ride from wherever you’re staying. Takao is the exception. It’s a river valley in the mountains northwest of town, home to three separate temples — Jingo-ji, Kozan-ji, and Saimyo-ji — strung along a stretch of the Kiyotaki River, and getting there…
Northern Kyoto has one of the city’s largest concentrations of historic temples packed into a few blocks, and Daitoku-ji is the anchor of the neighborhood: a walled Zen compound holding more than twenty sub-temples behind a single set of gates. Most visitors never see more than a handful of them. The complex isn’t set up…