Otsu on Foot: Over the Hills to Lake Biwa, Kyoto's Other Half
フラッグシップ・ウォークガイドの第2回は、滋賀・大津です。
京都から電車でわずか9分。山をひとつ越えた先にある琵琶湖のほとりの町を、旧市街から三井寺、琵琶湖疏水、そして湖岸まで歩く地図の形で案内します。このブランドの名前の由来そのもの——「京都のその先」を歩く回です。
この記事は英語が本文です。日本の方にも読んでいただけたらうれしいです。
この記事で分かること
京都から9分で着く大津の歩き方、旧市街と三井寺、琵琶湖疏水と湖岸、水の都から京都へ戻る2つの方法と2つの町を組み合わせる方法が分かります。
急ぐ人は、目次の『The walk at a glance』から先に読めます。
Local walks in Kyoto & Lake Biwa — beyond the guidebook
When I started Beyond Kyoto Walks (that first article is here), I said the name does two jobs — and this walk is the second one, made literal. Beyond Kyoto itself. East of Kyoto's famous streets, a low wall of hills hides an entire other world: Shiga, and Lake Biwa. Most visitors glimpse it through a train window and keep going. We are going to stop, get off, and walk it.
The companion guide to this one covers Kyoto city itself. Read them as a pair: the capital in the morning, the lake after — or, as I would do it, the lake as the day's whole point.
The walk at a glance
The shape is a gentle downhill drift from temple to water:
Kyoto to Otsu — nine minutes by train, and a different prefecture
The old town — post-town streets under the hills
Mii-dera — the great temple above the town
The Lake Biwa Canal — Kyoto's lifeline, flowing past the temple's foot
Hamaotsu and Otsu Port — down to the lakeside for the afternoon light
Home to Kyoto — two railways, two ways back over the hills
Give it a full day if you can. Otsu repays slowness even more than Kyoto does — there is simply less noise competing for your attention.
Step 1: nine minutes that change the weather of a trip
Take the JR Biwako Line from Kyoto Station toward Maibara or Nagahama and ride two stops — Yamashina, then Otsu. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's official guide puts it at nine minutes, and it still surprises people: you leave a world-famous city, pass through one short tunnel of hills, and arrive in the capital of Shiga, on the shore of the largest freshwater lake in Japan.
Feel the change as you step off the train. Otsu has a station-front bustle, but it is a working town's bustle — prefectural offices, shopping streets, schoolkids — not a sightseeing machine. First local-eye tip of the day: nobody here is performing for you, and that is exactly the relief of the place. Head east from the station, downhill, toward the water you cannot quite see yet.
Step 2: the old town — the last stop before Kyoto
Otsu's downtown streets carry an older job description. In the Edo period this was Otsu-juku, the 53rd and final post town on the Tokaido — the last inn town where travellers slept before entering Kyoto, and the point where goods from the lake boats were loaded for the capital. The official record notes the wooden townhouses, the machiya, that lined its streets; walk the blocks between the station and the lake with that in mind and you will still catch them — old shopfronts and sake-and-tea merchants folded into an ordinary modern shopping street.
Do not rush this stretch. Kyoto's famous lanes are preserved like exhibits; Otsu's old town is simply still in use. Note the cafés in converted townhouses, and let the street slope you down toward Hamaotsu, the harbour quarter.
Step 3: Mii-dera, the temple above the town
From Hamaotsu, the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line's Miidera Station is one short stop north — the temple's own directions put the gate a 10-minute walk from there. Climb gently and you are in Mii-dera, formal name Onjo-ji, head temple of the Tendai Jimon school, spread across the wooded lower slopes of Mount Nagara.
This is no minor detour. The Kannon-do here is the 14th temple of the Saigoku thirty-three-temple pilgrimage, and the temple's great bell — the Evening Bell of Mii — has been counted among the Eight Views of Omi for centuries. But what a walker notices is the space: broad gravel courtyards, halls strung along the hillside, and lookouts where the town suddenly drops away and the whole southern basin of the lake opens up. Kyoto's great temples ask you to queue; Mii-dera asks you to wander. The temple suggests 50–60 minutes for a visit; I would give it ninety and take the slopes slowly.
Practical notes from the temple's official site: open 9:00–16:30, last admission 16:00, every day; admission ¥800 for adults. Those hours shape the whole walk — temple in the late morning, lake in the afternoon, never the other way round.
Step 4: the canal — the thread that ties the two cities
Walk back down toward the station and look for the water that is not the lake. Beside the temple's foot runs the Lake Biwa Canal, and standing over it, you are standing over the reason these two cities are one story. Completed in 1890, the First Canal takes in water at Mihogasaki, here in Otsu, slips through tunnels beneath the hills below Mii-dera, and emerges at Keage in Kyoto — dug to carry goods and drive waterwheels, and still, today, the channel through which Kyoto draws the lake's drinking water.
Locals on both sides grow up knowing this: turn on a tap in Kyoto and you are, in a real sense, drinking Lake Biwa. Walk a stretch of the canal's open channel here at its starting end — cherry trees along the banks, the water sliding quietly toward the tunnel — and you have walked the first page of Kyoto's modern history. The famous brick aqueduct and incline are at the Kyoto end; the lake end is quieter, and it is ours.
Step 5: Hamaotsu and the lakeside — the afternoon belongs to the water
Follow the slope down to Hamaotsu and Otsu Port, and the day changes key. The buildings stop, the sky doubles, and there it is: Lake Biwa, about 670 km² of water — Japan's largest freshwater lake, a sixth of Shiga Prefecture, roughly four million years old, one of the world's few ancient lakes. From this southern shore it behaves less like a lake and more like a small, kind sea.
This is where Otsu's people do their own walking. The lakeside promenade — the Nagisa park shore running south from the port — is the town's front garden: joggers, anglers, families, and nobody selling anything. My advice is the same as at home in Kyoto: go late. The light across the southern basin in the last hour of the day, with the Hiei mountains turning dark behind you and the water going silver, is the single best free show on either side of the hills. (One line for another day: the white torii standing in the water at Shirahige Shrine is far up the western shore in Takashima — a separate trip, not part of this walk.)
The port is also where the sightseeing boats tie up — check the operators' boards on the day if time on the water appeals. But the shore itself, walked slowly, is the experience this guide is built on.
Getting back, and how to pair the two halves
Two ways home, both easy. The JR Biwako Line from Otsu Station returns you to Kyoto in the same nine minutes. Or stay by the water until the end and take the Keihan lines from Biwako-Hamaotsu, which thread back over the hills into Kyoto by a different route — a fitting way to close a day about connections. (For how IC cards behave on these lines, the cruise series' money guide has the general system.)
Pairing the halves is the real lesson here. Kyoto and Otsu were never two destinations; they are one town split by a range of hills — a capital and its lake port, its water supply, its last inn. Walk both in one day and you will understand each better than a week in either alone. That is what "beyond" means. Let us keep going.
Quick checklist: Otsu in one day
□ Kyoto → Otsu: JR Biwako Line, two stops, nine minutes.
□ Start with the old town; Mii-dera is a 10-minute walk from Miidera Station.
□ Mii-dera: open 9:00–16:30 (last admission 16:00), ¥800; allow 90 minutes.
□ Temple in the late morning, lake in the afternoon — the hours shape the day.
□ Hamaotsu and Otsu Port: go late for the last hour of light.
□ Two ways back: JR Biwako Line from Otsu, or Keihan from Biwako-Hamaotsu.
Follow the walks
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@BeyondKyotoWalks — walking videos and Shorts, the discovery entrance to this project
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/beyondkyotowalks/
Thank you for walking with me — over the hills, to the lake, and back in the last of the light.
— Beyond Kyoto Walks
Local walks in Kyoto & Lake Biwa — beyond the guidebook
次に読む
Northern Higashiyama on Foot: A Morning Walk from Ginkakuji to Nanzenji
Sources
Temple, lake, canal and town details are from official sources:
Mii-dera (Onjo-ji), official site — visitor guide: hours 9:00–16:30 (last admission 16:00), open daily; admission ¥800 for adults (¥500 junior/senior high school, ¥300 elementary); a typical visit takes 50–60 minutes; the Kannon-do is the 14th temple of the Saigoku pilgrimage; access via the Keihan Ishiyama-Sakamoto Line, 10 minutes on foot from Miidera Station: http://www.shiga-miidera.or.jp/guide/index.htm
Shiga Prefecture, "About Lake Biwa": Japan's largest freshwater lake, area 669.26 km² (about one-sixth of the prefecture), shoreline about 235 km, an ancient lake of roughly four million years, supplying water to some 14.5 million people in the Kinki region: https://www.pref.shiga.lg.jp/de51/2878.html
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (Japan), multilingual tourism text database — "Relationship between Otsu and Kyoto": Otsu is nine minutes from Kyoto by train, and the two cities are also connected by the Lake Biwa Canal, which supplies Kyoto with drinking water and hydroelectric power: https://www.mlit.go.jp/tagengo-db/R2-01413.html
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (Japan), multilingual tourism text database — "Otsu as a Post Town on the Tokaido": in the Edo period Otsu was the 53rd and final post town on the Tokaido, its downtown filled with wooden machiya townhouses, inns and teahouses: https://www.mlit.go.jp/tagengo-db/R2-01412.html
Kyoto City, official city history — "The Lake Biwa Canal": the First Canal, completed in 1890, takes water from Lake Biwa at Mihogasaki in Otsu, passes beneath the hills below Mii-dera, and runs to Keage in Kyoto: https://www2.city.kyoto.lg.jp/somu/rekishi/fm/nenpyou/htmlsheet/toshi27.html
Biwako Otsu Tourism Association (Biwako Otsu Travel Guide), official site — for the latest local event and access information in Otsu: https://otsu.or.jp/information/shigapredccpn/
Walking times within Otsu other than the temple's own station-to-gate figure are approximate local knowledge. Train times and admission fees are as published by the official sources above when checked in November 2026 — confirm the latest before you travel.
Cover photo: Ukimido (Mangetsu-ji), Lake Biwa, Otsu — Photo: 663highland, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.
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