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Demo covers: Tokyo × 2, Mt. Fuji (snow), Kyoto, Nara, Osaka, Seoul. All entries have GPS — shows full map route, 2-country stats, weather variety including snow. Deploy/reset instructions in docs/demo/README.md. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
24 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
24 lines
1.6 KiB
Markdown
---
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title: 'A Thousand Torii Gates'
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date: '2026-03-28 11:30'
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template: entry
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published: true
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hero_image: ''
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lat: '34.9671'
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lng: '135.7727'
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location_city: 'Kyoto'
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location_country: 'Japan'
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weather_temp_c: 18
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weather_desc: 'Sunny'
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---
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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