Kyoto beyond the crowds: quiet temples and mountain shrines
Kyoto beyond the crowds: quiet temples and mountain shrines
Kyoto's crowding problem is smaller than it looks. It is concentrated in about six places: Kiyomizu-dera, Fushimi Inari, Kinkaku-ji, the Sagano bamboo grove, Gion after dark, and Arashiyama's main street. Walk twenty minutes past any of them, or take one more bus, and the city empties out. The eighteen places below are all reachable from Kyoto Station in about an hour, though a couple of them ask for a climb once you arrive, and none of them will be busy on a Tuesday morning in June.
This is a catalogue, not an itinerary. You probably do not want to visit them all. Pick two or three from one area and give them the morning they deserve, because the thing that makes these places worth the trip is having time to sit down in them. Three at the end need an advance application, and the postcard route needs weeks, so read that section before you plan around it.
At a Glance
Sagano's quiet end
- Otagi Nenbutsu-ji: 1,200 moss-covered rakan, most of them laughing
- Adashino Nenbutsu-ji: 8,000 nameless stones on an old burial ground
- Gio-ji: a one-room thatched hut and a floor of moss
- Jojakko-ji: a hillside pagoda with the best view in Sagano
- Okochi Sanso Garden: a film star's garden, and the bamboo grove without the crowd
- Seiryo-ji: a vast quiet courtyard ten minutes from the tour buses
- Daikaku-ji: an imperial villa on a pond dug for moon-viewing
Up Mt Atago
- Atago Shrine: four hours on foot, round trip, and that is the point
The northern mountains
- Kurama-dera: a mountain temple and the trail over the ridge
- Kifune: a lantern-lit stairway and dining platforms over the river
- Enryaku-ji on Mt Hiei: the monastery that shaped Japanese Buddhism
Ohara
Takao
- Jingo-ji: 400 steps, and clay discs thrown into a gorge
- Kozan-ji: a World Heritage temple in the cedars
Apply in advance
Sagano's quiet end
Almost everyone who comes to Arashiyama stops at the bamboo grove and turns around. The old road continues north for another two kilometres, climbing gently through Sagano to the preserved thatched street at Toriimoto, and the temples along it are the best walk in Kyoto. Do it downhill: bus up to Otagi Nenbutsu-ji at the top and walk back, and you will pass everything below in order over about four hours if you stop at all seven.
Otagi Nenbutsu-ji
The 1,200 stone rakan here are not medieval. They were carved in the 1980s and early 1990s by ordinary people who came to help rebuild a temple that had been wrecked by a typhoon, under the guidance of the sculptor-priest Kocho Nishimura, and it shows in the best way. One holds a tennis racket. Two share a cup of sake. Many are laughing. Moss has since taken them, which gives the whole hillside the look of something far older than it is. It sits at the very top of the Sagano road, further out than most visitors are willing to go, so you may well have it to yourself.
Adashino Nenbutsu-ji
Ten minutes downhill, and the mood inverts completely. Adashino was a burial ground from the Heian period, and earlier a place where the bodies of the unclaimed were left in the open. In the Meiji era the scattered grave markers were collected into the temple, and around 8,000 weathered stone buddhas and small pagodas now stand shoulder to shoulder in tight rows. None of them is individually remarkable, which is precisely the effect. On the last Saturday and Sunday of August, 29 and 30 August in 2026, candles are lit among them for the Sento Kuyo.
Gio-ji
A tiny temple, one thatched hut and a garden you can cross in a minute, and one of the few places in Kyoto where a small admission fee is unambiguously worth it. The floor is moss, dozens of species of it, running right up to the walls under a maple canopy. The story attached is from the Tale of the Heike: Gio, a dancer cast aside by Taira no Kiyomori, retired here with her mother and sister. Come in the rain if you can, when the moss lifts and the colours saturate.
Jojakko-ji
Built on a slope, which is the whole point. You climb through the gate, past a thatched Nio-mon, up mossy steps to a small pagoda, and from the terrace beside it the Kyoto basin opens out below you. In November this is one of the best views in the city and still nothing like as crowded as the temples on the other side of the river. The maples here are among the earliest in Sagano to turn.
Okochi Sanso Garden
The private garden of Denjiro Okochi, a star of prewar samurai films, who spent three decades building it into the hillside. The circular path climbs to views over the Hozu gorge and the city, and the admission includes tea and a sweet in the teahouse, which softens the sting of it being the most expensive garden on the Sagano walk. It also sits at the far end of the bamboo grove, so the last stretch of path in is the grove with a fraction of the people.
Seiryo-ji
A ten minute walk from the Sagano crowds and almost nobody goes. The courtyard is enormous and mostly empty, gravel and old pines around a big hall. Its Shaka Nyorai statue is one of the strangest objects in Japanese Buddhism: carved in China in 985 as a copy of a much older Indian image and brought to Japan two years later, and when it was opened in 1954 it was found to contain silk organs, a mirror and documents, placed inside to make the image a living body. The temple grounds are free to walk.
Daikaku-ji
Emperor Saga's detached palace before it was a temple, and it still feels like a villa: broad corridors on stilts, painted screens, and a pond that was dug for boating and moon-viewing more than a thousand years ago. Osawa Pond is the oldest garden pond in Japan and one of the country's three great moon-viewing sites, which is why the temple holds boat rides on it at the mid-autumn moon. It is also the home of the Saga Goryu school of ikebana.
Up Mt Atago
Behind all of this rises Mt Atago, and on top of it sits the head shrine of some 900 Atago shrines across Japan, dedicated to protection from fire. Kyoto kitchens still carry its talisman. Reaching it is a serious walk, which is why almost no tourist does.
Atago Shrine
Set expectations before you start: this is roughly a four hour round trip on foot from the Kiyotaki trailhead, climbing about 800 metres with no cable car and no shortcut. What you get is a mountain path through cedar with old stone lanterns and rest huts along it, a shrine at 924 metres that has been there in some form since the eighth century, and an emptiness that is hard to find anywhere else near Kyoto. Start early, take water, and check the last bus from Kiyotaki before you commit. In winter the upper section holds snow and ice.
The northern mountains
North of the city the Kamo river valley narrows into steep cedar hills, cooler than the basin by several degrees in summer. The Eizan Railway from Demachiyanagi runs into it in about half an hour, which makes this the easiest genuinely mountainous half-day from central Kyoto.
Kurama-dera
A temple on a sacred mountain, founded in 770, where the boy who became Minamoto no Yoshitsune is said to have been trained by tengu. Since 1949 it has followed its own syncretic school rather than mainstream Tendai. The reason to come is the walk: a trail climbs past the main hall and over the ridge, through cedar and over exposed tree roots, and drops down the far side into Kifune in about an hour. A cable car covers the steepest first section if you would rather skip it.
Kifune
The far end of that walk, and worth the trip on its own. A stone stairway lined with red lanterns climbs to Kifune Shrine, which has been a place to pray for water since before records. In summer the restaurants along the river build kawadoko, platforms directly over the rushing water, and serve lunch on them with the air ten degrees cooler than the city. The shrine's fortune slips are blank until you float them on the spring.
Enryaku-ji on Mt Hiei
The monastery on the ridge northeast of the city is where Japanese Buddhism was reorganised: Honen, Shinran, Dogen and Nichiren all trained here before founding their own schools. Oda Nobunaga burned the entire complex in 1571 and killed its inhabitants, and what stands now is the rebuilding. It is enormous, spread across three areas along the ridge, and quiet in a way that a single temple never is. Reach it by Eizan cable car and ropeway from Yase, or from the Shiga side at Sakamoto.
Ohara
An hour north by bus, a farming valley of shiso fields and stone walls that has been where Kyoto people go to withdraw from the world for a thousand years. Two temples, one on each side of the valley, twenty-five minutes apart on foot. Do both, or the bus ride is poor value.
Sanzen-in
The garden temple of the valley, and a Tendai monzeki once headed by imperial princes. Ojo Gokuraku-in, a small hall of the late twelfth century, holds a National Treasure Amida triad from 1148 whose two attendants kneel rather than stand, as though leaning forward to collect someone. Outside, the moss is scattered with warabe-jizo, small child-like figures carved by Sugimura Takashi and half-buried in green. They are below eye level and easy to walk straight past.
Jakko-in
On the other side of the valley, and the place where the Tale of the Heike closes. After the Taira were destroyed at Dannoura in 1185, Kenreimon-in, Kiyomori's daughter and mother of the child emperor who drowned there, took vows and lived out her life at this nunnery. The temple does not hide that its main hall is new: an arsonist burned it down in 2000, the case was never solved, and it was rebuilt in hinoki and dedicated in 2005. The charred original Jizo survived and is kept in a repository above the hall, shown only on set days.
Takao
Northwest, up the Kiyotaki valley on Route 162, about 50 minutes by JR bus from Kyoto Station and far enough that the buses run only a few times an hour. Two temples sit two stops apart. The altitude means the maples here turn a week or two before the city, which is useful to know if you arrive in mid-November and find central Kyoto still green.
Jingo-ji
You earn this one: down to the river, then about 400 stone steps, roughly twenty minutes of climbing. The temple dates to 824, Kukai lived here for years after returning from China, and its treasures are extraordinary for a mountain temple, including a National Treasure Yakushi Nyorai and a bell of 875 counted among the finest in Japan. What people remember, though, is standing on the Jizo-in terrace at the far edge of the grounds throwing small clay discs out over the gorge to shed misfortune. The practice is said to have started here.
Kozan-ji
Two stops further up the valley, in a cedar forest, and a World Heritage site. The monk Myoe was given the land in 1206 and made the place what it is. Sekisui-in, a National Treasure hall with an open veranda that frames the trees, is where you see the Choju-giga, the twelfth and thirteenth century scrolls of rabbits and frogs behaving like people that get called the ancestor of manga. Be clear that the originals are in the Tokyo and Kyoto National Museums and what hangs here is a reproduction. The tea plot below the temple is described as Japan's oldest.
Apply in advance
Three places in Kyoto are quiet for a structural reason: you cannot simply turn up. All three take applications, two of them through the Imperial Household Agency, and all three are worth the paperwork. Check the official sites for the current rules before you rely on the table below, since fees and application windows have both changed in recent years.
Place | How to apply | How far ahead | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
Saiho-ji (Kokedera) | Official website, or a return postcard by post, including from overseas | Online until the day before; by post, allow weeks | Includes a sutra-copying session before you enter the garden |
Katsura Imperial Villa | Imperial Household Agency, online or in person | Applications open about three months ahead | Guided tour only, photo ID, 18 and over |
Shugakuin Imperial Villa | Imperial Household Agency, online or in person | Applications open about three months ahead | Free, guided tour only, photo ID, 18 and over, a limited number of same-day slots from 08:40 |
Saiho-ji, the moss temple
Around 120 species of moss under maples, on a garden laid out in the fourteenth century by Muso Soseki, and the model that later Japanese gardens copied. The reservation system exists because unrestricted visitors were destroying the moss. You copy a sutra at a low desk in the hall first, which takes as long as it takes, and only then walk the garden, and the delay does something to how you look at it.
Katsura Imperial Villa
A seventeenth-century prince's villa in the southwest of the city, and the building modern architects make pilgrimages to. Bruno Taut called it the finest architecture in Japan, and Walter Gropius came too; Le Corbusier visited in 1955 and was unimpressed. The tour walks the stroll garden and around the outside of the buildings, and the whole design is a sequence of framed views, each one composed for the moment you turn a corner.
Shugakuin Imperial Villa
In the northeastern foothills, and the opposite of Katsura in scale: three separate villas on a hillside, connected by paths that run between working rice paddies still farmed by local people. The upper garden opens onto a borrowed view across the Kyoto basin to the hills beyond that is arguably the finest single view in Kyoto. Retired emperor Go-Mizunoo laid out the upper and lower villas in the 1650s; the middle one was added to the estate much later.
Choosing Two or Three
If you have one free morning and are already in Arashiyama, take the bus to the top of the Sagano road and walk down: Otagi Nenbutsu-ji, Adashino Nenbutsu-ji, Gio-ji, Jojakko-ji. Three hours, four temples, one bus ticket.
If you have a full day and a bus pass, go to Ohara. Sanzen-in and Jakko-in with lunch between them fills a day comfortably and gets you further from the city than anything else on this list that does not involve climbing.
If you are here in the second week of November and the city has not turned yet, go to Takao. Jingo-ji and Kozan-ji will be at their best a week or two before Kiyomizu-dera is, and you will be looking at them over far fewer heads.
FAQ
There are eighteen places here. Which should I actually pick?
Pick by area, not by ranking, because the travel time between areas is what will eat your day. Sagano's quiet end is the best single choice for a first visit: seven places on one downhill walk, no reservations, and you are already near Arashiyama. Ohara is the best half day if you want to be properly out of the city. Takao is the right answer in mid-November, when it turns before everywhere else.
What is the difference between Otagi Nenbutsu-ji and Adashino Nenbutsu-ji?
They sit on the same road about ten minutes apart and the names look nearly identical, but they are opposites. Otagi has 1,200 rakan carved in the 1980s and 1990s by amateur volunteers, many of them grinning, one holding a tennis racket, all of them now under moss. Adashino has around 8,000 weathered stones for the nameless dead, gathered from an old burial ground, and is sombre. Most people who go that far out see both, in that order, walking downhill.
How much of this can I do in one day?
One area, and two or three of its temples. That is not a limitation of the list, it is what these places are for: the reason to come out here rather than queue at Kiyomizu-dera is that you can sit in a garden for forty minutes without anyone standing over you. Four temples in a day is possible along the Sagano road because they are on one street; four in different areas is a day spent on buses.
Which of these need to be booked in advance?
Saiho-ji, Katsura Imperial Villa and Shugakuin Imperial Villa. Saiho-ji takes applications through its own website or by reply-paid postcard, the two imperial villas through the Imperial Household Agency, which opens slots roughly three months ahead. Everything else on this list you can simply walk into. Check the official sites for current fees and rules, both of which have changed in recent years.
When is the quietest time to visit?
Weekday mornings before ten, at any time of year. Beyond that, June and early July are underrated: the rain brings the moss up at Gio-ji and Saiho-ji, and the northern valleys are several degrees cooler than the city. Avoid the last two weeks of November if crowds are the thing you are escaping, with the exception of Takao, which peaks earlier.
Can I reach Ohara and Takao without a car?
Yes, both are bus-only but straightforward. Ohara is Kyoto Bus 17 from Kyoto Station, about an hour; the same route passes Demachiyanagi, about 35 minutes out. Takao is the JR bus from Kyoto Station, about 50 minutes. Buses to Takao are infrequent, so check the return departure before you start up the steps at Jingo-ji. A subway and bus day pass covers Ohara and pays for itself if you visit both temples there.
