Nijo Castle

Ninomaru-goten is six connected buildings, thirty-three rooms, and some three thousand square metres of tatami, walked in stockinged feet on a fixed one-way route. It is a national treasure and the most complete surviving example of a shogun’s residential palace anywhere in Japan.

The sequence is the point. You move inward through waiting rooms of descending rank, each with wall paintings calibrated to the status of whoever was allowed to sit there – snarling tigers where provincial lords waited, quieter pine and heron further in. The Ohiroma audience hall at the centre is where, in 1867, Tokugawa Yoshinobu told the assembled lords he was returning power to the emperor. The building where the shogunate ended is still standing and you walk through it.

The corridors squeak underfoot – the uguisu-bari, or nightingale floors. Whether that was an intruder alarm or just the behaviour of old joinery is still argued about; either way, there is no way to cross the palace silently, and hearing four hundred visitors announce themselves is oddly the best part of the visit.

No photography inside. The castle grounds are fine.

Three different schedules run at once and they catch people out constantly.

The castle is closed 29 to 31 December. Ninomaru-goten is closed 26 to 28 December, 1 to 3 January, and every Tuesday in January, July, August and December – four months, chosen because they are the quiet ones. Honmaru-goten, reopened after a long restoration, closes on the third Monday of each month and the following day.

So a Tuesday in August gets you an ¥800 castle whether you like it or not. If your Kyoto days are fixed and one of them is a Tuesday in one of those months, move Nijo to another day rather than paying for the grounds alone.

Rarely. The Ninomaru garden, laid out by Kobori Enshu, is genuinely good – a pond with three islands and a great deal of very deliberate rock – and the walk round the inner moat and up onto the Honmaru keep base gives you the only elevated view in central Kyoto that is not from a hotel. But ¥800 for that alone is poor value in a city where the Imperial Palace grounds are free.

The exception is cherry season. Nijo has around three hundred late-flowering trees and runs an evening illumination in spring, and the grounds at night are a different proposition from the grounds at two in the afternoon.

Practically: the Tozai subway drops you at Nijojo-mae outside the gate, last entry is 16:00 rather than 16:30, and the palace queue on a wet afternoon can add twenty minutes because everyone is taking their shoes off at the same door. Reckon on ninety minutes for the ¥1,300 visit.