Northern Higashiyama on Foot: A Morning Walk from Ginkakuji to Nanzenji
フラッグシップ・ウォークガイドの第1回は、京都市内です。
北東山の朝——銀閣寺の開門に合わせて入り、哲学の道を南へ下り、法然院に寄り道して、南禅寺と蹴上で締める、私がいちばん好きな「歩く地図」です。この道の水は、琵琶湖から来ています。歩き終わる頃、その意味も見えてきます。
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
銀閣寺の開門から始める北東山の朝の歩き方、哲学の道と法然院、南禅寺と蹴上、実用情報と琵琶湖疏水の水の話が分かります。
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
The port guides took us around other people's harbours. This one is home ground: the first of the flagship walks I promised when Beyond Kyoto Walks began (that first article is here).
Northern Higashiyama is the Kyoto of the postcards' quieter cousin — no geisha-spotting scrum, no single overwhelming sight, just a string of temples along the foot of the eastern hills, joined by a canal-side path. It is the walk I give friends who have one free morning and want the city to make sense. Here it is the way I walk it: whole shape first, then the zoom.
The walk at a glance
One line, running north to south along the hills, almost level the whole way:
Ginkakuji (the Silver Pavilion) — in at opening time, before the lane fills
The Philosopher's Path — the canal-side promenade heading south
Hōnen-in — a short climb off the path to a thatched gate and two mounds of raked sand
The path's southern half — the quietest stretch, past the lanes of Shishigatani
Nanzenji — the great Zen complex: free grounds, a towering gate, and a brick aqueduct
Keage — the old incline railway of the Lake Biwa Canal, and the subway home
Half a day if you linger only a little; a full, slow morning if you linger properly. Every step below is that map, zoomed in.
Why this direction, and why morning
Two decisions make this walk, and both are the local's habit from my brand declaration: go early, and walk the day in the right order.
North to south because the only hard deadline sits at the start. Ginkakuji is the one stop with a gate, a ticket and a crowd curve that rises all morning — so it goes first, at opening, while the approach lane is still waking up. Everything after it is flexible: the path has no closing time, Hōnen-in's grounds open earlier than the pavilion does, and Nanzenji's wide grounds absorb people instead of queueing them. The direction also finishes at a subway station (Keage) rather than starting at one, and the walking itself is kind: the route eases very gently downhill as you go south.
Morning because this is a district of gardens and water, and both are at their best before the day's voices arrive. By noon the famous parts are still beautiful — just shared with everyone who had the same idea later than you.
Step 1: Ginkakuji at opening
Ride the city bus to Ginkakuji-do (the temple's own directions start there) and walk up the sloping approach lane to the gate of Jisho-ji — for that is Ginkakuji's real name, the villa of the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, turned temple after his death.
The temple's published hours: 8:30–17:00 from March to November, 9:00–16:30 from December to February, open every day of the year. Admission is ¥1,000 for adults (high-school age and above) and ¥500 for elementary and junior-high students — note that the fee was revised in April 2026, so older guidebooks showing ¥500 are out of date. Be at the gate a few minutes before opening and you will have the famous view nearly to yourself: the wooden pavilion — never actually clad in silver, and all the more loved for it — across the raked white Ginshadan, the "sea of silver sand", with its perfect cone, the Kogetsudai, beside it.
The temple's one-way circuit then carries you through the moss garden and up the hillside path to a lookout over the roofs of the city. The temple's own guidance puts the circuit at about half an hour; take forty minutes and let the climb be slow. One honest caution: the approach lane outside — the souvenir slope everyone photographs — is where the crowds of this walk live. You will pass through it twice, briefly, and otherwise never meet them again.
Step 2: onto the Philosopher's Path
Come out of the gate, drop back down the lane, and turn south onto the water. The Philosopher's Path (Tetsugaku-no-michi) follows a branch of the Lake Biwa Canal from Ginkakuji-bashi bridge down to Wakaoji-bashi — about 1.8 km, which Kyoto's tourism association describes as roughly thirty minutes at a leisurely pace. Nobody walks it in thirty minutes. That is rather the point.
Kyoto City's canal history pages explain the name: the path is where Nishida Kitaro, the Kyoto University philosopher, is said to have walked in thought. You will understand him quickly. The water beside you — flowing, unusually, south to north — is Lake Biwa water, brought through the hills in Meiji times; hold that thought until the end of the walk, where it becomes the whole story.
Walk the first stretch slowly. Cafés and craft shops edge the northern end, cats hold office hours on the stone walls, and the lane is still a neighbourhood street that happens to have a canal in it. This is the parallel-lane principle at district scale: the same hills as the famous Higashiyama sights, a fraction of the people.
Step 3: the detour — Hōnen-in
About a third of the way down, watch for the lanes climbing east into the woods of Shishigatani. A few minutes uphill is Hōnen-in, and this is the detour that makes the walk yours.
There is no spectacle to queue for. A thatched gate, a sand-and-earth approach under camellias and maples, and inside the gate the Byakusadan — two great mounds of white sand, raked with patterns that change with the seasons. The temple grounds are free to enter and open 6:00–16:00; the halls are not normally open, and that is fine. Hōnen-in is a place you stand in quietly for ten minutes, not a checklist item. Twice a year the temple opens its interiors for a few days — in autumn, the official site lists a special opening of the abbot's quarters and its painted screens in late November (¥800 for adults) — but the grounds on an ordinary morning, with the sand freshly raked and nobody about, are the version I would choose anyway.
Come back down the same lane to the canal. You have spent perhaps twenty minutes and stepped completely out of the sightseeing current.
Step 4: the southern half of the path
South of Hōnen-in the path grows quieter still: the canal narrows, the cafés thin out, and the walk becomes what it was for Nishida — a place to think at walking pace. The residential lanes one street over are worth a wander; there is no wrong turning, because the canal is always one street east to catch you.
You will pass the turning for Eikan-do near the southern end — famous, deservedly, and a visit in its own right on another morning. Today we walk past. Knowing what not to add is the other half of building a walk around one area.
Step 5: Nanzenji — the gate, the garden, the aqueduct
The path ends at Wakaoji-bashi, and a few minutes further south the trees open onto Nanzenji, head temple of its own Zen school and the walk's southern anchor.
Nanzenji works the opposite way to Ginkakuji: the grounds themselves are free, and you pay only for the buildings you choose to enter. Its published hours for the paid areas are 8:40–17:00 from March to November and 8:40–16:30 from December to February, with entry until twenty minutes before closing — and note that general visiting stops entirely from 28 to 31 December. Two paid stops, each ¥600 for adults:
The Sanmon gate — climb the great wooden gate for the view over the temple roofs to the city; the famous panorama is the reward for the steep stairs.
The Hojo garden — the abbot's quarters and its celebrated dry landscape garden, all gravel, rock and stillness.
But the thing I bring people here for costs nothing and hides in plain sight. Crossing the grounds is the Suirokaku, a long brick aqueduct of arches, Meiji-era engineering standing in the middle of a Zen temple — and it is not a ruin. Lake Biwa water still runs along the top of it. The canal you have been following all morning passes through this temple, overhead. Stand under the arches and the whole walk snaps into focus: this district's beauty is plumbed into a lake in the next prefecture.
Step 6: Keage — where the boats climbed the hill
Finish the story properly. From Nanzenji, walk south a few minutes — locals shortcut through the Nejirimanpo, a pedestrian tunnel of spiralling brick, the way the temple's own directions point visitors from the station — and you are at Keage.
Here the canal met a slope too steep for boats: about 36 metres of drop. The Meiji engineers' answer, preserved today as the Keage Incline, was a railway — about 582 metres of track, the longest incline of its kind in the world when it opened in 1891, up which boats on wheeled cradles were hauled by cable, powered by the canal's own hydroelectric plant. It worked until 1948. Now the rails run down a cherry-lined slope that anyone may walk, with Keage Station on the Tozai subway line at its foot — your ride back into the city, and the full stop at the end of the walk.
This is why the brand is called Beyond Kyoto. The most famous morning walk in the city turns out to be a walk along Lake Biwa's water, ending at the machine that carried boats over the hill from the lake. Kyoto and Shiga are not two trips. They are one watershed — and in the next flagship guide, the Otsu and Lake Biwa shore walk, we follow the water home.
Practical notes
Getting there: city bus to Ginkakuji-do for the start. Getting back: Keage Station (subway Tozai Line) at the finish — no need to retrace a step. If your legs give out mid-walk, Kyoto's city bus route 5 shadows this district, linking the Ginkakuji-do area with the Nanzenji / Eikando-michi stop near the southern end.
The morning in money: Ginkakuji ¥1,000, plus ¥600 each for Nanzenji's Sanmon and Hojo garden if you climb and enter both — ¥2,200 does the whole walk's paid sights. Hōnen-in, the path and Nanzenji's grounds are free.
Seasons, generally: the canal is lined with cherry trees, so spring is glorious and busy; the maples along the path and at Hōnen-in turn in late autumn; winter mornings are the emptiest of all, and the moss gardens do not care what month it is. In peak blossom and autumn-colour weeks, the opening-time start stops being a tip and becomes the whole plan.
Decency notes: this is a living neighbourhood — keep voices down on the residential lanes, and at Hōnen-in treat the sand mounds and the quiet as the exhibit.
Quick checklist: a morning in Northern Higashiyama
□ Start: city bus to Ginkakuji-do.
□ Ginkakuji ¥1,000; Nanzenji's Sanmon and Hojo garden ¥600 each.
□ Finish: Keage Station (Tozai subway) — no need to retrace a step.
□ Spring cherry trees: glorious and busy; maples colour the path.
□ Living neighbourhood — keep voices down; at Hōnen-in, stand quietly.
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 — from the Silver Pavilion to the boats' railway, along the lake's own water.
— Beyond Kyoto Walks
Local walks in Kyoto & Lake Biwa — beyond the guidebook
次に読む
Otsu on Foot: Over the Hills to Lake Biwa, Kyoto's Other Half
Sources
Temple hours, admission and access, and the canal history, are from official sources:
Jisho-ji (Ginkakuji), official site (Shokoku-ji school), access and visiting pages: address 2 Ginkakujicho, Sakyo-ku; city bus to Ginkakuji-do; hours 8:30–17:00 (1 March–30 November) and 9:00–16:30 (1 December–end of February), open year-round; admission ¥1,000 for adults (high-school age and above) and ¥500 for elementary and junior-high students: https://www.shokoku-ji.jp/ginkakuji/access/ and https://www.shokoku-ji.jp/en/ginkakuji/
Kyoto City Tourism Association, introduction to the Philosopher's Path: about 1.8 km from the Wakaoji Bridge area to Ginkakuji, roughly 30 minutes at a leisurely pace (as quoted from the association's published guide information).
Kyoto City, Japan Heritage "Lake Biwa Canal" official site — the branch canal promenade from Kumano Nyakuoji Shrine to Ginkakuji is called the Philosopher's Path after the philosopher Nishida Kitaro and others who walked it in thought: https://biwakososui.city.kyoto.lg.jp/place/detail/38
Hōnen-in, official site: autumn special opening of the temple interiors (abbot's quarters and painted screens), 18–24 November, 9:30–16:00, ¥800 for adults; the temple's published information gives the grounds as free to enter, 6:00–16:00: http://www.honen-in.jp/N-0397-J.html
Nanzenji, official site, visiting and access pages: paid-area hours 8:40–17:00 (1 March–30 November) and 8:40–16:30 (1 December–28 February), entry until 20 minutes before closing, no general visiting 28–31 December; admission — Hojo garden ¥600 and Sanmon gate ¥600 for adults; access — 10 minutes on foot from Keage Station (subway Tozai Line) via the Nejirimanpo tunnel, or city bus to Higashi-Tennocho / Nanzenji-Eikando-michi, 10 minutes on foot: https://www.nanzenji.or.jp/about_rinzaishu/visit and https://nanzenji.or.jp/about_rinzaishu/profile
Kyoto City, Japan Heritage "Lake Biwa Canal" official site — Keage Incline: an incline railway of about 582 m overcoming a height difference of about 36 m between the Keage and Nanzenji boat reservoirs, the longest in the world at its construction, carrying boats on cradles by the cable principle; in operation from 1891 to 1948: https://biwakososui.city.kyoto.lg.jp/place/detail/23 and https://biwakososui.city.kyoto.lg.jp/en/episode/detail/8
Walking times other than the Kyoto City Tourism Association's Philosopher's Path figure are approximate local knowledge. Temple hours, fees and special openings change — check each temple's official site before you go.
Cover photo: Suirokaku aqueduct, Nanzenji, Kyoto — Photo: 鵜飼 実幸 / CC0 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
— Plan your visit —
Affiliate note: the links below are affiliate links. If you book or buy through them, Beyond Kyoto Walks may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
Kyoto activities and tickets on Klook
Search stays in Kyoto (Booking.com)
