There’s a correlation between whether they ask you to remove your shoes to explore a castle and the quality of the castle. So our theory goes with our two data points. We visited Matsumoto without shoes, and it was well preserved. We visited Osaka Castle with our shoes on, and it was made of concrete. As good scientists, we went to Kyoto’s Castle to add data to our set and confirm or refute our theory.
At Kyoto Castle, they’ve asked us to remove our shoes to explore the sprawling building. This place is not built for height or for war, even if it has a moat and walls. It was built as the seat of power of the local shōgun, military dictators in feudal Japan from 1185 to 1868. It was built with multiple meeting rooms for different levels of formalism when meeting the shōgun. Each room has a different set of paintings on the dividers, designed to give guests a distinct impression of the shōgun.
The tigers from the first few rooms are interesting because there were no tigers in Japan at the time. What you see are paintings of furs and drawings by a Chinese artist of Korean tigers. Still, the tigers are quite expressive and beautiful, if not anatomically correct.
Walking the castle and the grounds is well worth it, and the castle itself was worth removing our shoes to walk it. That new data point seems to confirm our theory about shoes and castles. No pictures are allowed in the castle (no explanations given on why) so we don’t have proof but you can trust us.
Good news, however, pictures are allowed on the grounds, and as we’ve met Karine’s favourite bird: a crane, we’re glad of it. The crane was actively fishing and not minding us at all. The bird’s flippant attitude toward us is probably explained by its being relatively safe just a couple of meters into the gardens, as they are off limits to the general public. We get to walk around them but not through them. It preserves the place's beauty but prevents you from enjoying most of it.
From the castle, we walked to Gion Shirakawa. It’s a three-street neighbourhood that preserves the historical spirit of the original Kyoto—lined with canals and small wooden buildings. It’s quite pretty and makes for nice pictures, but that’s about it. There are no signs we could see explaining the area's historical value or the specific buildings.
We ended our day of exploring Kyoto by heading to the city's outskirts to Fushimi Inari Taisha. It’s a mountain Shinto shrine dedicated to the gods of business. It’s covered in Torii (gates) bought by businesses (or businessmen). I’m not sure how much help that is, but we’re told that a single Torii is worth around 130,000 in today’s dollars (add two zeros for yen).
You’ll see a large number of fox statues as foxes are the guardians of the shrine. Traditionally, the foxes would guard the key to the rice granaries (as long as it’s not the henhouse). As such, they are depicted as guardians on most of the 32,000 shrines on the hill. Most statues will either have a cylinder in their mouth (containing the key) or a ball (containing a jewel).
You might think that 10,000 gates and 32,000 shrines would make the site feel crowded, but actually, there’s plenty of room. If you aim for the summit, it will take you about 1.25 hours, and you’ll leave most of the people behind you by the first 30 minutes. The whole run will take about 2 hours of walking, plus another hour in 2-minute increments, trying to get a good shot of a series of gates or a statue on a shrine.
We enjoyed our late-afternoon walk at the shrine, and I recommend arriving about 3 to 4 hours before sunset to make the most of the light for your photos.