Katsura Imperial Villa

Prince Toshihito began the villa around 1615 and his son finished it over the following decades, and almost nothing has been altered since. Three linked buildings step back from the pond in a diagonal line, an arrangement called flying geese, and around them sit four teahouses, each built for a different season and a different view.

Bruno Taut, a German architect who came to Japan in 1933, wrote that Katsura was the equal of anything in the Western canon, and modernists took it up as proof that Japan had arrived at their conclusions three centuries early. The comparison flatters both sides and misses the point: this is a garden built for a specific set of aristocratic pleasures, boating, moon-viewing, tea, poetry, and every stone in it is placed to serve one of them.

The path is the design. Stepping stones are set at deliberately awkward intervals so you must watch your feet, and then the path turns and a view opens all at once. It happens repeatedly and it is not accidental. There is a platform built specifically for watching the moon rise over the pond.

Visits are by guided tour only, an hour long, booked in advance through the Imperial Household Agency website, with a small number of same-day tickets released at the gate. The fee is 1,000 yen and visitors must be 18 or over. You do not go inside the buildings; you walk the circuit while a guide talks, with an English audio guide available.

It is a twenty-minute walk from Katsura station on the Hankyu line, in a quiet residential part of western Kyoto.