Gangoji

Look at the roof of the main hall from the south side. Part of it is a different colour, a mottled grey-brown against the newer tiles, and those are the originals: clay tiles fired around 590 for Asuka-dera and carried here when the capital moved. They are the oldest roof tiles in Japan and they are still doing their job, laid in the overlapping gyoki style that predates the flat tiles used everywhere later.

Asuka-dera was the country's first full temple complex. When the court moved to Nara in 718 the temple came too and was renamed Gangoji, and it became one of the seven great temples of the southern capital, its grounds covering most of what is now the Naramachi district. Then it declined, burned, and shrank. What survives is the Gokurakubo main hall and the monks' Zen room behind it, both National Treasures, sitting on an ordinary residential street.

In the side garden stand roughly 1,500 stone pagodas and Jizo figures, collected from around the precinct and set in rows. In September the bush clover comes into flower between them, which is the one week of the year the temple gets busy. The treasure hall holds a five-storey wooden pagoda just over five metres tall, a Nara-period model rather than a miniature, and it is worth the extra minutes.

Entry is 500 yen. The whole visit takes about forty minutes and you may well have it to yourself, which is not something you can say about Todai-ji fifteen minutes north. Combine it with a walk through Naramachi's old merchant houses, which is what the temple grounds turned into.