Kimpusen-ji

Walk up Yoshino's main street from the ropeway and it runs straight into the Zao-do, the main hall of Kimpusen-ji. It is hard to miss: 34 metres tall under a cypress-bark roof, and according to the temple the largest old wooden building in Japan after the Great Buddha Hall at Todai-ji. The present hall was finished around 1592, after earlier ones burned more than once. This is the head temple of Kimpusen Shugen Honshu, a school of Shugendo, the mountain-ascetic tradition, and the people in white you sometimes pass on the street are here for it. The temple's story is that En no Gyoja, after a thousand days of austerities on Sanjogatake, carved Zao Gongen in mountain cherry wood and enshrined the figure on that peak and here.

For most of the year you pay 800 yen to stand in a dim hall facing the shut doors of a huge shrine cabinet. The three Zao Gongen inside are hidden buddhas, and the doors open only for set periods each spring and autumn. Plan around those if you can. The figures are blue, with flames behind them and one foot raised as if stamping, and the central one is more than 7 metres tall. In 2026 the spring opening ran from 24 March to 6 May and the autumn one runs from 24 October to 30 November, with the fee doubled to 1,600 yen. During openings the Yoshinoyama ryokan association also runs a candlelit evening service in the closed hall, only for people staying the night on the mountain, so ask your inn.

Two warnings. The Niomon, the big north gate and the oldest building on the site, is under a full dismantling repair that the temple aims to finish in fiscal 2028, and its guardian statues are on deposit at the Nara National Museum, so the approach looks like a building site for now. And the hall closes at 16:00, earlier than you might expect after a slow lunch in town.

For the temple I would come in late October or November, when the statues are on view and the streets are much quieter than in April.