Kiyomizu-dera

Kyoto’s crowd problem is mostly a scheduling problem. The temples open within half an hour of each other at 8:30 or 9:00, the coach tours are built around that, and by ten the eastern hills are saturated. Kiyomizu-dera steps outside the pattern by two and a half hours.

At 6:15 the approach up Kiyomizu-zaka is closed shops and delivery vans. The stage – the famous timber platform braced out over the slope on pillars pegged without nails – holds perhaps a dozen people. You can stand at the rail, look back at the hall from the Okunoin terrace, and hear the Otowa waterfall. By 10:30 all three of those things involve waiting.

The cost is that the shops on the approach are shut and the tea houses are not serving, which is exactly the trade you want: do the temple at dawn and the walk down through Higashiyama afterwards, when the lanes have opened and the temple has filled up behind you.

The main hall and its stage are the reason people come, and the 2017–2020 re-roofing has left the cypress-bark roof looking better than it has in decades. The stage stands about thirteen metres above the slope and was built for performances toward the Kannon enshrined inside, not as a viewing platform – which is why the best photograph of it is taken from the Okunoin hall further round the hillside, not from the stage itself.

Below, the Otowa waterfall splits into three streams and visitors queue to drink from one with a long-handled cup. The convention is that you choose a single stream and that taking all three is greedy. At 6:30 there is no queue for it at all.

Jishu-jinja, the matchmaking shrine behind the main hall, has been closed for reconstruction for several years and remains a building site – if a guide sends you to walk between its two love stones with your eyes shut, that guide is out of date.

Admission to the main hall is ¥500. The temple states plainly that there is no group discount, and it waives the fee for accompanying teachers on school trips and for visitors with a disability certificate plus one companion.

There is no station at the temple and no parking in the grounds. The buses put you at Kiyomizu-michi or Gojo-zaka, ten minutes below the gate, and the last stretch is steep and lined with shops. The temple also warns that map applications route people up lanes that do not reach the entrance: the only two approaches are Kiyomizu-zaka past the Nio gate, and the Chawan-zaka service road, which is also the wheelchair route.

The autumn evening viewing from 21 to 30 November coincides with the peak of the maples in eastern Kyoto, which is exactly why it is the busiest ticket the temple sells. If you want the illumination, go on the first two evenings rather than the last weekend.