Most of Kyoto's walks are about temples. This one is about commerce — the Nakagyo grid where the city's merchants traded for centuries, and where the machiya townhouses, the old banks, and the sake and silk shop-fronts still stand among the offices.
Start at the Museum of Kyoto Annex, a red-brick former Bank of Japan branch from 1906 — Meiji Kyoto trying on Western dress — with its banking hall kept intact and free to enter. West along Sanjo-dori runs a short row of early-20th-century brick and stone: old banks, a postal building, the 1916 SACRA building, all shops below and intact above. Then drop south into the lanes, where the wooden machiya (merchant townhouses) survive in runs, lattice fronts and noren curtains, the long 'eel-bed' plan behind.
The grid still trades: sake houses with a cedar sugidama ball at the door, Nishijin silk merchants with bolts stacked in tatami rooms. Step in, look, buy nothing if you like. End up on broad Oike-dori — the modern avenue over the old grid — back at Karasuma Oike.
