Japan travel
Practical guides on speaking, grammar, pronunciation, listening, and study planning, written for learners who want to use Japanese in real life.
Japan travel · Page 6
Tōfuku-ji Guide: Maple Valley, Zen Gardens and Japanese to Use
Tōfuku-ji is a great Zen temple in the south of Kyoto, famous for a covered wooden bridge over a valley of maples and for bold modern rock gardens. It is one stop from Kyoto Station, easy to pair with Fushimi Inari, and a good place to practise buying temple tickets in Japanese.
13 min readKurama and Kibune Guide: Mountain Hike, River Dining and Japanese to Use
Kurama and Kibune are two villages in the forested hills north of Kyoto, joined by a mountain trail over the temple grounds of Kurama-dera. A half-day loop takes you from a cable car and tengu legends to a water shrine and, in summer, lunch on platforms above a rushing stream.
14 min readŌhara and Sanzen-in Guide: Moss Gardens, Village Temples and Japanese to Use
Ōhara is a farming village in the hills an hour north of central Kyoto, and Sanzen-in is its great temple: halls set in a cedar forest over a carpet of moss. Come for the gardens, stay for the quiet lanes, the pickle shops and the smaller temples further up the valley.
12 min readHeian Jingū Guide: Giant Torii, Palace Replica, Garden and Japanese to Use
Heian Jingū is a shrine built in 1895 as a scaled-down copy of the palace of the old capital, with a huge vermilion torii and a wide white-gravel courtyard. Behind it lies one of the finest Meiji-era gardens in Kyoto, with stepping stones across a pond and weeping cherries in April.
12 min readTō-ji Guide: Five-Storey Pagoda, Kōbō-san Market and Japanese to Use
Tō-ji is the temple whose five-storey pagoda you see from the shinkansen as you arrive in Kyoto. Founded with the capital itself and later given to Kūkai, it holds one of the most powerful rooms of Buddhist statues in Japan, and on the 21st of every month it becomes a huge open-air market.
12 min readNanzen-ji Guide: Great Gate, Brick Aqueduct, Yudōfu and Japanese to Use
Nanzen-ji is one of the most important Zen temples in Japan, set at the foot of the eastern hills with a huge wooden gate you can climb and a Meiji-era brick aqueduct running through its grounds. The lanes around it are famous for yudōfu, simmered tofu, the classic temple-district lunch.
13 min readByōdō-in and Uji Guide: Phoenix Hall, Matcha Town and Japanese to Use
Byōdō-in's Phoenix Hall, the temple on the ten-yen coin, sits by a pond in Uji, a riverside town twenty minutes south of Kyoto that has been famous for green tea for centuries. See the hall, then spend the afternoon drinking matcha on the tea street outside its gate.
12 min readSannenzaka and Ninenzaka Guide: Stone Slopes, Old Shops and Japanese to Use
Sannenzaka and Ninenzaka are two stepped, stone-paved lanes of wooden townhouses that wind down from Kiyomizu-dera towards Yasaka and Gion. They are the most photographed streets in Kyoto, lined with tea shops, pottery, sweets and pickles, and the best place in the city to practise souvenir Japanese.
12 min readPontochō Guide: Lantern Alley, Riverside Yuka and Japanese to Use
Pontochō is a stone-paved alley barely wide enough for two people, squeezed between the Kamo River and the Takase canal, lined with restaurants, bars and teahouses behind lanterns. From May to mid October, the restaurants on its river side build wooden decks out over the water for dining in the open air.
12 min readTenryū-ji Guide: Sōgenchi Garden, Cloud Dragon and Japanese to Use
Tenryū-ji is the great Zen temple of Arashiyama, first among Kyoto's Five Mountains, with a fourteenth-century pond garden that borrows the hills behind it. Add the dragon painted on the lecture hall ceiling and a Zen vegetarian lunch inside the grounds, and it is worth half a day on its own.
12 min readNara Park Guide: Deer, Shika Senbei, Etiquette and Japanese to Use
Nara Park is the big green heart of Japan's first permanent capital, where well over a thousand wild deer wander between temples, lawns and souvenir stalls. It is free, open all year, and one of the friendliest places to try your first few sentences of Japanese.
12 min readTōdai-ji Guide: Great Buddha, Nandaimon, Nigatsudō and Japanese to Use
Tōdai-ji is home to Nara's Great Buddha, a bronze figure about fifteen metres tall inside one of the largest wooden halls in the world. The grounds are free, the main halls charge a small fee, and the ticket window is a perfect place to use a few polite sentences in Japanese.
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