Togetsukyo Bridge

A bridge has crossed here since 836, when a monk of Horin-ji built the first one a little upstream. The name came four centuries later from the retired emperor Kameyama, who watched the moon travel across the sky above the deck on an autumn night and said it looked like a moon crossing a bridge. Togetsukyo. Names in Kyoto are rarely this literal. The current structure went up in 1934. The deck and piers are reinforced concrete, because the river floods hard and wooden bridges here kept washing away, but the railings and parapets are wood and shaped in the old style, so from a distance it reads as a timber bridge. Photograph it from the north bank looking south, with Arashiyama behind it. The river changes name under the bridge. Upstream, coming out of the gorge, it is the Hozu. Downstream it is the Katsura. Same water. Autumn is when the hillside behind turns and the entire district becomes very hard to move through. Cherry season is nearly as bad. The bridge is 155 metres long and crossing it on a November Sunday can take fifteen minutes. Come at dawn, or in the rain, when the mist sits in the gorge and half the coaches cancel. On summer evenings, roughly July to September, cormorant fishermen work the water upstream of the bridge from boats with fire baskets hanging over the bow. You can watch from the bank for nothing or book a place on a passenger boat. Rental rowing boats operate from the north bank in daylight.