Shitenno-ji

Nothing you can see is from 593. Shitenno-ji has burned or fallen down repeatedly – lightning, fire, and finally the air raids of 1945 – and the pagoda and main hall you walk around today were rebuilt in reinforced concrete in 1963. In that respect it is the same story as Senso-ji in Tokyo.

What is genuinely ancient is the plan. The Shitennoji-style layout – south gate, middle gate, five-storey pagoda, main hall and lecture hall all on a single north-south axis inside a roofed corridor – is the oldest temple arrangement in Japan, imported directly from the Korean peninsula, and every rebuild has kept it. You are looking at a sixth-century diagram rendered in twentieth-century material, and standing in the corridor at the south end is the only place in Japan you can read that plan at full size.

The ¥500 Central Garan ticket is what puts you inside that corridor and lets you climb the pagoda. It is the one of the three charges worth paying if you are paying for anything. The ¥300 Honbo Garden, laid out on Pure Land principles with two ponds and a tea house, is quiet and pleasant and entirely skippable on a tight day.

On the 21st of every month the temple holds its memorial day for Prince Shotoku, and the grounds fill with one of the largest and least sanitised flea markets in Kansai – several hundred stalls of second-hand kimono, old tools, ceramics, plants and unclassifiable junk, running through the forecourt and along the corridors. Hours are extended on that day and the atmosphere is completely different: less temple, more medieval market fair, which is closer to what a great temple precinct was for.

If your dates allow any flexibility at all, put Shitenno-ji on the 21st. If you are in Kyoto that month instead, the equivalent is Toji on the 21st, and both are free. There is more on the Osaka market on its own page.

The 22nd, for what it is worth, is the quietest day of the month here.

Open 8:30, closing 16:30 from April to September and 16:00 from October to March. The outer grounds stay walkable later than the ticketed areas. That winter 16:00 close is early even by Japanese temple standards and is the commonest wasted trip here.

Shitennoji-mae Yuhigaoka on the Tanimachi subway line puts you at the north gate in four minutes. From Tennoji Station it is about a twelve-minute walk north, which makes the temple an easy pairing with Shinsekai and Tsutenkaku on the same afternoon – that route is written up as the Namba to Shinsekai walk.