Monuments and Memorials in Kyoto
A visual guide from the Kyoto travel guide — see all posters in Visual Guides.
The Hamaguri Gate on the western side of Kyoto Gyoen got its name, so the story goes, because it stayed shut for years and opened only during a great fire in 1788 — like a clam (hamaguri) opening in the heat. Kyoto's monuments tend to work like that — less about reverence than about stories, engineering and who was in charge. The five-storey pagoda at To-ji is a fifty-five-metre timber structure that has survived four rebuildings, and Nijo Castle is a grand show of status with a floor designed to squeak.
Statements of power
Nijo Castle, on the Tozai subway line, was built in 1603 as the shogun's Kyoto residence and is where the last of them handed authority back in 1867; the Ninomaru Palace interiors, painted screens and nightingale corridors are the highlight, and the outer moat circuit adds another half hour. To-ji's pagoda, a short walk from Kyoto Station, is the tallest wooden tower in Japan and the easiest in the city to photograph at dusk. Kyoto Gyoen, the walled park around the old Imperial Palace, is free to enter, and the palace enclosure itself no longer needs an advance permit.
Memorials worth the detour
Above Higashiyama, the Ryozen Museum of History covers the 1860s, when Kyoto was the centre of the changes that ended the shogun era, and the graves of Sakamoto Ryoma and Nakaoka Shintaro sit on the slope above with a wide view over the basin. In Okazaki, the free Lake Biwa Canal Museum remembers the 1890 canal that brought water, boats and Japan's first commercial hydroelectric power to the city; the old Keage Incline railway track beside it is lined with cherry trees and makes a lovely walk in early April. Back in the centre, the kneeling statue of Takayama Hikokuro at the east end of Sanjo Bridge is one of Kyoto's best-known meeting points.