Things to Do in Kyoto: A 3-Day Guide That Actually Works

Kyoto has around 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines, and if you try to see them you will hate the city by day three. The better approach is to pick four or five things you actually care about, walk between them, and spend the saved time eating.

The things to do in Kyoto that justify the trip are Fushimi Inari at dawn, the Higashiyama lanes before nine, one serious garden, one meal you plan around, and a tea ceremony or craft workshop where somebody explains what you are looking at. Three days covers that comfortably. Here is how to build them.

Kinkakuji

How many days do you need in Kyoto?

Three full days is the honest answer. Two is enough for the headline sights and will feel rushed. Four or five lets you add day trips and slow down.

A workable three-day shape:

• Day 1, east: Fushimi Inari early, then Kiyomizu-dera and the Higashiyama lanes, Gion in the late afternoon

• Day 2, northwest and center: Kinkaku-ji, Ryoan-ji and Ninna-ji in the morning, Nishiki Market and downtown in the afternoon

• Day 3, west: Arashiyama for the morning, Tenryu-ji and the monkey park, back into town for a tea ceremony or a craft workshop

Kyoto is also a viable day trip from Tokyo, at 2 hours 15 each way on the shinkansen, but you will see one district and spend five hours on trains. Stay the night if you possibly can.

Temples and shrines worth your time

Fushimi Inari Taisha

Fushimi Inari Taisha

Fushimi Inari Taisha is free, open around the clock, and two minutes from JR Inari Station. Thousands of vermilion torii gates run up Mount Inari, each one paid for by a business, in a tradition that has been going since the shrine was founded in 711.

Go at 06:30 or after 19:00. In between, the lower gates are a slow-moving queue. The full loop to the summit takes two to three hours; most people turn back at the Yotsutsuji junction about 45 minutes up, which is where the view over the city opens out.

Kiyomizu-dera and Higashiyama

Kiyomizu-dera was founded in 778 and its main hall stands on a wooden platform built out over the hillside without nails. Entry is ¥500 and it opens at 6:00, which is the single most useful piece of timing in Kyoto.

The approach through the Higashiyama old town is the real attraction: Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka, stone-paved lanes of wooden shopfronts under a preservation order, running down toward Yasaka Shrine and Gion. Empty at seven, impassable by ten.

Kinkaku-ji and the northwest

The Golden Pavilion was a shogun's retirement villa, converted to a Zen temple after his death in 1408, burned down by a novice monk in 1950 and rebuilt in 1955. Kinkaku-ji's gold leaf is the third floor's exterior, and the visit is a one-way loop of about 30 minutes for ¥500.

Do not go there alone. Ryoan-ji is 2 km away and Ninna-ji another 2 km beyond it, all on the same road, and the three together make one strong morning instead of a long bus ride for a single photograph.

Ginkaku-ji and the eastern canal

The Silver Pavilion has no silver and never did; the shogun who built it ran out of money. What Ginkaku-ji has instead is a sand garden with a raked cone meant to be seen by moonlight, and a moss garden climbing the hill behind with a view back over the city.

From there the Philosopher's Path runs two kilometers south along a canal under 400 cherry trees to Nanzen-ji, which is a free and largely crowd-free walk outside blossom season.

Gardens

Ryoan-ji

Kyoto's gardens are not decoration attached to temples. They are the argument the temple is making, in plants and stone.

Ryoan-ji is the famous one: fifteen rocks in raked gravel, arranged so that you can never see all fifteen at once from any position on the veranda. Nobody knows who made it or what it means, which has not stopped 500 years of people explaining it.

Tenryu-ji in Arashiyama has a 14th-century pond garden designed to borrow the Arashiyama mountains as its background, a technique called shakkei. The garden costs ¥500 and the buildings another ¥300, and the garden is the part to pay for.

The three garden styles

Karesansui

Karesansui, dry landscape, uses rock for mountains and raked gravel for water, with almost no plants. It came out of Zen monasteries in the 14th and 15th centuries and is designed for sitting and looking rather than walking. Ryoan-ji and the sub-temples of Daitoku-ji are the places to see it.

Tsukiyama

Tsukiyama, hill gardens, build artificial hills, ponds and streams to compress a real landscape into a small site, often borrowing a distant mountain into the composition. Tenryu-ji and the Shugaku-in Imperial Villa are the examples.

Chaniwa

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Chaniwa, tea gardens, exist to be walked through on the way to a teahouse. The stepping stones, the stone basin where you rinse your hands, the low gate you have to stoop through: each element is there to slow you down and reset your attention before the ceremony starts.

Gion and the geisha districts

Gion is the largest of Kyoto's five hanamachi, the geisha districts, and the answer to whether you can see geiko and maiko is yes, briefly, usually around 17:30 to 18:30 as they walk to appointments.

The rules matter here. Photography is banned on the private lanes around Hanamikoji, chasing or blocking a geiko carries a fine, and the residents have lost patience with visitors who treat a working neighborhood as a set. Stand aside, do not touch, do not follow.

If you want to actually see a performance rather than a glimpse of someone at work: Gion Corner runs a nightly one-hour sampler of tea ceremony, koto, kyomai dance and bunraku puppetry. The spring Miyako Odori, in April, is a full dance program by the Gion maiko and geiko and is the real thing.

Shirakawa, a block north, is the prettiest part of the district and the least crowded. Pontocho, a narrow alley across the river, is where to eat afterward.

Kyoto food and where to eat

Kyoto Cuisine

Kyoto cooking is built on what the city lacked. It is 50 km from the sea, so the tradition runs on tofu, freshwater fish, pickles, yuba and vegetables rather than sashimi.

Kaiseki is the formal multi-course meal, and Kyoto invented the modern version out of tea-ceremony cuisine. Expect ¥15,000 to ¥40,000 a head at dinner in a serious place, and note that many require a reservation through your hotel and will not take walk-ins. Lunch kaiseki at ¥5,000 to ¥8,000 is the sensible way in.

Shojin ryori is Buddhist temple cuisine, entirely plant-based, served at several temples around Arashiyama and Daitoku-ji. It predates the modern idea of vegan cooking by about 800 years and is far better than that description suggests.

Yudofu is blocks of tofu simmered in kombu broth and eaten with condiments, a Kyoto specialty concentrated around Nanzen-ji and Arashiyama. It sounds like nothing and is excellent in cold weather.

Yudofu

Obanzai is Kyoto home cooking, served as a row of small dishes at counter restaurants downtown. This is the best-value way to eat well here, usually ¥2,000 to ¥4,000.

Nishiki Market is a 400-meter covered arcade in the center, five minutes from Shijo Station, with about 130 stalls selling pickles, knives, tamagoyaki, soy milk doughnuts and skewered seafood. Eating while walking is discouraged; most stalls have a place to stand.

Pontocho and Kiyamachi are where to eat at night, the first a lantern-lit alley of everything from yakitori counters to kaiseki, the second louder and cheaper. In summer, restaurants along Pontocho build kawadoko platforms out over the Kamo River.

Matcha is the other thing to plan around. Uji, 30 minutes south, is where most of Japan's best green tea comes from, and the tea shops in central Kyoto will serve you a properly whisked bowl for a few hundred yen.

Tea ceremony, kimono and crafts

Ceramics

A tea ceremony in Kyoto runs ¥3,000 to ¥6,000 for 45 to 90 minutes, usually in a machiya or a temple sub-hall, in English. The good ones explain what is happening and why the movements are that specific; the weak ones hand you a bowl and take a photograph. Ask whether you will be seated on tatami, since some visitors cannot manage it for an hour.

Kimono rental costs roughly ¥3,000 to ¥7,000 for a day, more for silk and for hair styling, with shops clustered around Gion, Kiyomizu and Arashiyama. Rentals include dressing, which takes 30 minutes and is not optional; a kimono is not something you put on yourself. Yukata in summer is cooler and cheaper.

Craft workshops are the underrated option. Kyoto still does Kiyomizu-yaki ceramics, Nishijin silk weaving, Kyo-yuzen dyeing, gold-leaf work, incense blending and knife making at a professional level, and many studios run 60 to 120-minute sessions.

Lacquerware

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Lacquerware, metalwork for tea utensils, and bamboo craft all still have working ateliers here too. Our guides to Japanese pottery and to traditional Japanese textiles explain what distinguishes the Kyoto styles before you book a session.

Arashiyama and the monkey park

Gion Matsuri

Arashiyama is 20 minutes west by train and deserves a morning rather than an hour.

The bamboo grove is a 500-meter path that takes ten minutes to walk and is photographed more than almost anywhere in Japan. Get there before 08:00 or accept the crowd.

The rest is better. Tenryu-ji's garden, the Togetsukyo bridge, the Hozu River boats, and the quiet Saga-Toriimoto lane with its preserved thatched houses at the northern end.

The Arashiyama monkey park is the one people skip and should not. It is a 20-minute uphill walk to a summit where about 120 wild Japanese macaques live free-range, and the view back over Kyoto from the top is the best in the city. You feed them from inside a caged hut, which correctly reverses the usual arrangement.

Festivals

Jidai Matsuri

Kyoto's festival calendar is worth planning a trip around.

Gion Matsuri, all of July, is the largest festival in Japan. The two Yamaboko Junko float parades fall on July 17 and 24, with the Yoiyama evenings before each one, when the floats stand lit in the streets and the downtown closes to traffic.

Aoi Matsuri, May 15, is the oldest, dating to the 6th century: 500 people in Heian-period court dress walking from the Imperial Palace to the Shimogamo and Kamigamo shrines.

Jidai Matsuri, October 22, runs 2,000 costumed participants through twelve centuries of Japanese history in reverse, ending at Heian Shrine.

Daimonji Gozan Okuribi

Daimonji Gozan Okuribi, August 16, lights five giant bonfires in the shape of characters on the mountains around the city to send the Obon spirits home. The dai character on Mount Nyoigatake is visible from most of the eastern side of town.

Setsubun, early February, brings bean-throwing to every shrine in the city. Yoshida Shrine and Heian Shrine put on the biggest versions.

Day trips from Kyoto

Nara is 45 minutes away and holds Todai-ji's 15-meter bronze Buddha in the largest wooden building most people will ever enter, plus 1,200 free-roaming deer. Half a day, easily.

Uji, 30 minutes south, is matcha and Byodo-in, the 1053 temple on the back of the ¥10 coin.

Osaka is 30 minutes by train and is the opposite of Kyoto in every respect, which makes it a good contrast day.

Himeji Castle is 90 minutes west and is the only entirely original castle keep in Japan.

Kurama and Kibune, 30 minutes north, give you a mountain temple, a forest walk between two valleys, and in summer restaurants serving over the river.

Our guide to the ancient temples and castles of Kyoto and Nara goes deeper on the Nara side if that is the day you pick.

Best time to visit Kyoto

Late March to mid April is cherry blossom season and the most beautiful and most crowded time of the year. Hotel prices roughly double and the famous sites are full by nine. Worth it once.

May is the quiet reward: warm, dry, green, and the Aoi Matsuri on the 15th. The best all-round month.

June is the rainy season, which means the moss gardens are at their peak and the city is half empty. Saiho-ji and Sanzen-in are specifically better wet.

July and August are hot and humid, in the mid thirties with high humidity, and Kyoto sits in a basin that traps it. Gion Matsuri and Daimonji make it worth enduring if you plan around the heat.

Mid to late November is fall color, and in Kyoto it is genuinely spectacular and as busy as spring. Tofuku-ji, Eikando and Kiyomizu-dera run night illuminations.

December to February is cold, clear and empty, and the one time you can stand alone in front of a famous garden. Snow on Kinkaku-ji is rare and worth changing plans for.