To-ji: the tallest pagoda and the temple market
Japan's tallest wooden tower, a temple of esoteric Buddhism, and the great monthly flea market. This is a Claude-drafted route awaiting the editor's walk.

1. The five-storey pagoda
Walk up from Toji station and the pagoda is the thing — at 55 metres the tallest wooden tower in Japan, rebuilt for the fifth time in 1644 after lightning kept taking the earlier ones. You see it best from across the *Hyotan-ike* pond, mirrored in the water, the line everyone wants and earns.

2. The Kondo and Kodo halls
*To-ji* is the headquarters of Shingon, the esoteric Buddhism Kobo Daishi brought from China in the ninth century. The *Kodo* (lecture hall) holds his three-dimensional *mandala* — twenty-one statues arranged as a single diagram of the cosmos. Pay the inner-precinct ticket; this is the reason beyond the pagoda.

3. Miedo (the founder's hall)
The hall where Kobo Daishi is said to still reside, served a meal every morning at six. Free to enter, quieter than the ticketed precinct, and the wooden veranda is a good place to sit. The morning ritual is worth timing if you're early enough.

4. Kobo-ichi market grounds
On the 21st of each month the precinct fills with a thousand stalls — antiques, old kimono, tools, plants, street food — the *Kobo-ichi* flea market held since the saint's death day. On any other day this is empty gravel; the market is the whole reason to come on the 21st, and a quiet temple any other morning.

5. Rashomon site
A few minutes east, a small stone in a playground marks where the *Rashomon* once stood — the great southern gate of the ancient capital, the one in the Kurosawa film and the older story. Nothing remains but the marker; stand on it and the scale of the vanished city does the rest.

6. The streets toward the station
Walk east along the old grid toward Kyoto Station, past Higashi Hongan-ji's vast roofs if you bear north. It's an unglamorous stretch of the real working city — bicycle shops, lunch counters — and a fair antidote to the temple. The station front appears at the end.

To-ji: the tallest pagoda and the temple market