Four Days in Kyoto: An Itinerary Built Around the Early Hours

Kyoto has a scheduling problem that almost no guidebook states plainly: the city's best sights close at half past four, and its worst hours are between ten and three. A Kyoto day is therefore not a full day. It is an excellent morning, a slow middle, and a second excellent hour around dusk, and the itineraries that fail are the ones that pretend otherwise.

Understand that and the city transforms. The lane below Kiyomizu-dera at seven in the morning is a stone staircase between wooden houses with nobody on it. At eleven it is a queue with a view. Fushimi Inari before eight is a mountain of vermilion gates and birdsong; by midday it is a corridor of raised phones. Nothing about the place has changed. Only the hour has.

This four-day route is built around that single insight. It is not the shortest path between the famous sites — it is the sequence that puts you in each of them when they are worth being in, with the slow middle of each day filled by things that are better in the heat and the crowds anyway: food halls, covered markets, gardens with shade, a long lunch.

The route in brief

Before you go: what four days costs

The lodging tax deserves a moment because it changed sharply this year and it is charged at check-in rather than shown in most online rates. Rooms under ¥6,000 a night pay ¥200 per person; ¥6,000–19,999 pays ¥400; ¥20,000–49,999 pays ¥1,000; ¥50,000–99,999 pays ¥4,000; and anything at ¥100,000 or above pays ¥10,000 per person, per night. For most travellers this is a rounding error. At the top end it is a real number, and it is the same for a couple sharing one room — the tax is per person.

Getting to Kyoto

Kyoto Station is not near most of what you have come to see, which surprises people. Budget twenty to thirty minutes from the station to Higashiyama or Gion.

Getting around, and the bus trap

The received wisdom is that Kyoto is a bus city. In practice, buses are now the slowest way to move around it. Routes serving the famous temples run at capacity through the middle of the day, and a two-kilometre journey can take forty minutes while you stand.

The routing that actually works:

• Walk. Kyoto's sightseeing districts are compact internally. Higashiyama is one continuous walk; so is Arashiyama.
• Use the two subway lines for long north–south and east–west hops. They are fast, empty by comparison, and unaffected by traffic.
• Use the JR and Keihan lines for Fushimi Inari, Tōfuku-ji, Arashiyama and Uji. All four are far better reached by train than bus.
• Take taxis at the edges of the day, when they are cheap and quick. A 6:30am taxi to Fushimi Inari costs around ¥2,000 from central Kyoto and buys you the best hour of the trip.
• Cycle, if you are comfortable in traffic. Kyoto is flat, gridded and ideal for it; rentals run ¥1,000–1,500 a day.

Day 1 — Southern Higashiyama

Start at 7am at Kiyomizu-dera. The temple opens at six, which almost nobody exploits. The wooden stage over the hillside is one of the great views in Japan and it is genuinely quiet for the first hour and a half.

Walk down through Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka, the preserved stone lanes below the temple, while the shops are still shuttered. This is the Kyoto of the photographs and it takes forty-five minutes at a slow pace. By ten it will be full.

Continue to Kōdai-ji, which most itineraries skip and should not: a hillside temple with a bamboo grove, a moss garden and a fraction of the traffic. Then Yasaka Shrine and Maruyama Park, where you can sit down properly for the first time.

Break for a long lunch — you have been walking since seven — and take the afternoon slowly. The Kyoto National Museum is nearby, air-conditioned and excellent, and is exactly the right kind of thing for one in the afternoon.

Return to Gion at dusk. The lanes around Hanamikōji and Shirakawa are at their best as the lanterns come on around five.

Day 2 — The golden north-west

Kinkaku-ji opens at nine and is busy from nine-fifteen. Be there at opening; the circuit takes thirty minutes and there is no reason to spend longer.

Ryōan-ji is a ten-minute walk and is the opposite experience: fifteen rocks in raked gravel, and the deliberate discipline of sitting on the wooden veranda long enough for it to work. Give it half an hour minimum. Its garden was designated a UNESCO World Heritage property along with sixteen other sites in the Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto.

Ninna-ji is next door, is far quieter, and has a five-storey pagoda and a garden that rewards the detour.

For the afternoon, go to Daitoku-ji, a walled complex of two dozen sub-temples of which four or five open to the public. This is the most consistently underrated place in Kyoto: sixteenth-century dry gardens, no crowds, and an atmosphere of a working monastery rather than a visitor attraction.

Evening: Nishiki Market closes around five or six, so aim for four. Then Pontochō, the single-file lane along the Kamo River, for dinner.

Day 3 — Arashiyama, and the trick to the bamboo

The Arashiyama bamboo grove is a twenty-minute walk that is famous, beautiful and, between nine and five, so crowded that people describe it as disappointing. It is not disappointing. It is simply full.

Take the first train out — you want to be walking it by seven at the latest. At that hour it is silent, green and completely different.

Then Tenryū-ji, whose garden is fourteenth century and largely unaltered, and whose back gate lets you out directly into the grove. Then climb to Ōkōchi Sansō, the former villa of a silent-film actor, where the ¥1,000 entry includes matcha and a view over the whole valley and where, for reasons nobody can explain, almost nobody goes.

Walk north through Sagano to Gio-ji, a tiny moss temple that takes ten minutes to see and stays with you longer than that, and Adashino Nenbutsu-ji with its field of stone Buddhas.

Back in the city by early afternoon. Make it an easy evening — the fourth day starts early.

Day 4 — Fushimi, Tōfuku-ji and tea

Fushimi Inari is open all night and has no gate and no entry fee, which makes it the single best early-morning site in Japan. Arrive by seven. The lower gates will have a handful of people; twenty minutes up the mountain you will have them entirely to yourself.

The full loop to the summit takes two to three hours and most visitors turn back at the Yotsutsuji viewpoint, about forty-five minutes up. That viewpoint is where the crowd thins to nothing and where the view over southern Kyoto opens up. Go at least that far.

Come back down for breakfast, then Tōfuku-ji, two stops away — a Zen complex with a modernist dry garden by Shigemori Mirei and a covered bridge that is the most photographed spot in Kyoto during autumn colour and pleasantly ordinary the rest of the year.

If you have the afternoon, take the Keihan line twenty minutes south to Uji: green tea, the Byōdō-in phoenix hall on the back of the ¥10 coin, and a riverside that feels several hundred kilometres from the Kyoto crowds.

Opening hours worth knowing

Where to stay

Base yourself in one of three areas and the itinerary above shortens by half an hour a day.

• Higashiyama / Gion — atmospheric, walkable to Day 1 and Day 4, quiet at night, most expensive.
• Karasuma / Shijō — central, on both subway lines, closest to food, the best all-round choice.
• Kyoto Station — least charming, most convenient for onward travel and day trips, cheapest.

Book one machiya — a restored wooden townhouse — if the budget allows. They are the reason to stay in Kyoto rather than commute in from Osaka.

Eating in Kyoto

Kyoto's food is quieter than Osaka's and more precise. The things to seek out:

• Obanzai — Kyoto home cooking, served as many small dishes. The city's most characteristic meal and the best value at the good end.
• Yudōfu — simmered tofu, a temple dish, at its best in Nanzen-ji's surrounding restaurants in cold weather.
• Kaiseki — the multi-course formal meal. Expensive at dinner; many kaiseki restaurants serve a considerably cheaper lunch version, which is how most people should try it.
• Nishin soba — buckwheat noodles with sweet simmered herring, a Kyoto station-district staple.
• Matcha, properly — in Uji, at source, rather than in an ice cream on Sannenzaka.

Hidden gems

• Shōsei-en, a walled garden ten minutes from Kyoto Station that almost nobody enters.
• Honen-in, just off the Philosopher's Path, with a thatched gate and moss ramps, free and usually empty.
• The Kamo River banks at dusk, where the whole city goes to sit. Buy something from a convenience store and join them.
• Fushimi's sake district, south of the Inari shrine, with a dozen breweries offering tastings.

Day trips, if you have a fifth day

Nara is the standard choice and deserves it — Tōdai-ji houses a fifteen-metre bronze Buddha in the largest wooden building of its kind, and the walk up to Kasuga Taisha through the lantern-lined forest is better than the shrine itself. Go early for the same reason as everything else in this guide.

Kurama to Kibune is the one to pick if you have already seen a lot of temples. It is a two-hour walk over a wooded ridge between two small villages, ending at a shrine on a stream, and it is the fastest way to remember that Kyoto sits in mountains.

Travelling with children, and travelling solo

With children, Kyoto is more demanding than Tokyo: more walking, more gravel, more places where the interesting thing is a garden requiring quiet contemplation. It works if you cut the temple count in half and build around Nara's deer, the Kyoto Railway Museum, the monkey park above Arashiyama and the riverbanks. The early-start strategy in this guide is also, conveniently, when children are in the best mood.

Solo, Kyoto is straightforward and safe at any hour. Counter dining is normal, single rooms are standard, and the early-morning temple hours are considerably easier to keep when nobody has to be negotiated with. Our first solo trip guide covers the broader case.

What to skip

Every Kyoto itinerary includes things that are famous rather than good, and four days is not enough to carry them.

• The Gion "geisha spotting" walk as an activity in itself. It has become intrusive, several lanes now prohibit photography, and you are unlikely to see anything except other visitors looking for the same thing.
• Kinkaku-ji after 10am. Thirty minutes of shuffling for one view you have already seen a hundred photographs of. Go at opening or not at all.
• The Philosopher's Path outside blossom and colour season. Pleasant, unremarkable, and it eats ninety minutes.
• A second bamboo grove. There are others. One is the correct number.

Accessibility

Kyoto is mixed and worth researching site by site. Kyoto Station, the subway and the main JR lines are step-free and well signed. Kiyomizu-dera has a paved accessible approach avoiding the stairs, and Kinkaku-ji's circuit is largely flat gravel. Fushimi Inari's mountain path, Ōkōchi Sansō and most of the Higashiyama lanes involve stairs and steep stone. Taxis are widely available, reasonably priced and often the practical answer.

Official resources

• Kyoto City Official Travel Guide — hours, seasonal events and the current lodging tax bands.
• UNESCO World Heritage: Historic Monuments of Ancient Kyoto — the seventeen inscribed sites.
• Japan National Tourism Organization — autumn colour and blossom forecasts.

If you only have two days

Compress to Day 1 and Day 4. Southern Higashiyama at dawn, Gion at dusk, Fushimi Inari the following morning, Tōfuku-ji after. You will have seen the two best things in Kyoto at the two best times, which is a better trip than seeing six things at eleven in the morning.

For how Kyoto fits into a longer route, see the complete Japan travel guide and the 14-day Japan itinerary.