Kyoto Station is the argument the city had with itself and mostly lost. Hiroshi Hara's 1997 building is a fifteen-storey canyon of steel and glass dropped into a town that had spent twelve centuries keeping its rooflines low — and it is, whatever the purists say, one of the great modern rooms in Japan. This walk pairs it with the two enormous temples that sit just to the north, the old city answering the new.
Start at the foot of the Daikaidan, the great staircase, and ride the escalators to the eleventh-floor Skyway and roof terrace — free, and the best free view in the south, the mountains all around. Then north to Higashi Hongan-ji, whose founder's hall is among the largest wooden buildings on earth; the scale only lands once you're standing on the tatami beneath it.
East to Shosei-en, the walled garden where the traffic vanishes, then west to Nishi Hongan-ji, older and gilded, its Karamon gate carved past the point of restraint. Walk back down Shomen-dori past the incense and altar shops to the station front, weather no object the whole way.
