The Forest Within the Gate: Kyoto, Japan

The early blooms of sakura

This post covers my second day in Japan, lets visit Kyoto. A city located in the central part of the island of Honshu, Japan. Kyoto was formerly known as the Imperial capital of Japan for more than one thousand years and now serve as the capital city of Kyoto Prefecture. The dialect spoken in Kyoto is known as Kyo-kotoba or Kyoto-ben. When Kyoto was the capital of Japan, the Kyoto dialect was the de facto standard Japanese and influenced the development of Tokyo dialect, the modern standard Japanese.

Kyoto Station

I started my adventure in Kyoto by visiting Arashiyama. It is the second-most important sightseeing district in Kyoto. It’s filled with temples and shrines, but the star attraction is the famed Arashiyama Bamboo Grove. The main street of Arashiyama, along with the famed Togetsukyo Bridge is the major tourist path.

The main street of Arashiyama

The Togetsukyo bridge as the background.

The bamboo grove

For the bridge towards the bamboo grove, on the left side of the road is the Tenryu-ji, the most important temple in Arashiyama district. It was ranked first among the city's five great Zen temples. It is also the head temple of its own school within the Rinzai Zen of Japanese Buddhism.

Tenryu-ji, with Zen landscape

Kyoto is dominated with about 2,000 religious places, palaces, gardens and architecture intact. The famous temples in Japan are Kiyomizu-dera, a magnificent wooden temple supported by pillars off the slope of a mountain. Other monuments of Ancient Kyoto listed by the UNESCO include the Kamo Shrines, Kyo-o-Gokokuji, Daigo-ji, Ninna-ji, Saiho-ji, Tenryu-ji, Kinkaku-ji, Ginkaku-ji, Ryoan-ji, Hongan-ji, Kozan-ji and the Nijo Castle (Nijo-jo), primarily built by the Tokugawa shoguns.

A climbing alley with many shops on the left and right towards the Kiyomizu-dera

The wide moat and massive stone wall surrounding the Nijo Castle

Fushimi Inari Shrine is an important Shinto shrine in southern Kyoto. It is famous for its thousands of vermilion torii gates, which straddle a network of trails behind its main buildings. The trails lead into the wooded forest of the sacred Mount Inari. To reach this unique shrine took a train from Kyoto to Inari station.

Torii gate of Fushimi Inari Shrine

Inari train station

While waiting for the train to Osaka, I just have a quite peek at the tallest structure in Kyoto, the Kyoto Tower, standing at 131 meters tall just across from Kyoto Station and is also a rare modern iconic landmark in the city.

Kyoto Tower, a view from Kyoto Station

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