Japan's ancient imperial capital — 1,600 temples, matcha at source, and the last geisha districts on earth
Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for over a millennium and the city that defines traditional Japanese culture — 1,600+ Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines (17 of them UNESCO World Heritage), kaiseki (multi-course Japanese haute cuisine), matcha grown in the surrounding Uji hills, and the Gion district where maiko and geiko still practice in the evenings. Unlike Tokyo's relentless modernity, Kyoto operates on a completely different register: wooden machiya townhouses line streets in Gion that haven't structurally changed in 200 years, the Fushimi Inari thousands-of-torii tunnel through the m…
Kyoto (then Heiankyō) was established as Japan's imperial capital in 794 CE when Emperor Kanmu relocated the court from Nara — the city was designed as a scaled-down version of Tang dynasty Chang'an, laid out on a grid with the Imperial Palace at its northern center. It remained the seat of the Emperor for over 1,000 years until the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when Emperor Meiji moved the capital to Tokyo (then Edo). The city's extraordinary cultural survival owes something to a deliberate Allied decision in 1945: Secretary of War Henry Stimson personally removed Kyoto from the atomic bomb tar…