---
title: 'A Thousand Torii Gates'
date: '2026-03-28 11:30'
template: entry
published: true
hero_image: ''
lat: '34.9671'
lng: '135.7727'
location_city: 'Kyoto'
location_country: 'Japan'
weather_temp_c: 18
weather_desc: 'Sunny'
---

The Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto takes two hours and twelve minutes. You travel at 285km/h. At one point Fuji appears out the right-hand window, clear and enormous and completely snow-covered, and the entire carriage rotates slightly to look at it. The mountain is visible for about four minutes. Then it is gone.

Kyoto is everything Tokyo is not: low, slow, wooden. The streets around Fushimi Inari were already warm with tourists at 11am but the shrine itself is large enough to absorb them. You walk under a tunnel of orange torii gates — thousands of them, each donated by a business and engraved with the donor's name — up a hillside through cedar forest, and the further you climb the more the crowd thins out.

I walked for two hours. Most visitors turn back at the first lookout. I kept going, past smaller shrines and stone fox statues and mossy steps worn down by a century of feet. Near the top the path was almost empty. The air smelled of pine and incense.

The city below spread out in all directions. Very few tall buildings — there are strict height regulations to preserve the sightlines. The Kamo River was a thin silver line running south. Distant mountains still wearing snow.

Dinner at a kaiseki restaurant in Gion, the old entertainment district. Eight small courses, each plated like a small still life. I ate slowly and said nothing and it was the right approach.