Ginkaku-ji

A circuit of about forty-five minutes around one of the best gardens in Japan. The pavilion itself – properly the Kannon-den – you see from across the pond and never enter, the same arrangement as Kinkaku-ji.

The two things worth slowing down for are the ginshadan, the raked sand platform, and the kogetsudai, the sand cone beside it. Neither is decorative. They are raked to catch moonlight and throw it back at the pavilion, which is what the garden was designed around in the fifteenth century, when Ashikaga Yoshimasa built it as a retirement villa and the evenings were the point.

The path then climbs the hillside behind the pond through moss and maples and comes back down with a view over the roofs. That climb is the part most visitors rush and the part that justifies the ticket.

There never was. The building was never covered in silver leaf and no record says it was meant to be – the name is a later contrast with the genuinely gilded Kinkaku-ji, not a description of a plan that ran out of money, which is the story you will be told.

What you are looking at is plain dark timber, and the point of it is restraint: this is the building that gave its name to Higashiyama culture, the aesthetic of understatement that also produced the tea ceremony and the tokonoma alcove. Arriving expecting a silver twin of the Golden Pavilion is the fastest way to be disappointed by one of Kyoto’s best buildings.

Open 8:30 in the March-to-November half of the year and 9:00 from December to February, closing at 17:00 and 16:30 respectively. The winter close at 16:30 catches people who have planned a late afternoon around it.

It sits at the north end of the Philosopher’s Path, and the sensible way to use it is to walk the canal south to north and arrive here at the end – that way the ¥1,000 is a decision you make having already had the best free hour in eastern Kyoto, rather than a ticket you buy before you know how tired you are.

Autumn colour here runs with the rest of eastern Kyoto: the maples on the hillside path are at their best in the last week of November.