Last weekend, I went to the village of Takao, in the mountains of northwest Kyoto. It’s the start of leaf-peeping season in the Kansai region, so I went with a friend to Takao to visit three temples that are famous for their autumn leaves.
Autumn leaf-peeping, especially of the gorgeous Japanese maple trees—known as momiji in Japanese--is a major past-time in Japan. Temples and parks become crowded at this time of year with hordes of spectators eager to see the vibrant reds and oranges of the momiji. There are even websites with autumn leaf status reports that you can view. My aunt, who is a frequent traveler to Japan, told me that even the local newspapers will feature regular autumn leaf updates. But being currently illiterate, I haven’t checked a newspaper yet to confirm this!
The temples we visited were: Kozan-ji, Jingo-ji, and Saimyo-ji. Kozan-ji is a series of temple buildings spread at multiple levels along a mountainside, with crumbling stone stairways and long stone paths connecting you between the buildings. The trees are so tall and dense there, that it felt more like I was in a forest than that I was visiting a temple in a forest.
The leaves have only just started changing at Kozan-ji, so there was mostly greenery, but what a glorious green they were.
Kozan-ji also happens to feature a set of scrolls that are known as the world’s first manga. (They show happy rabbits, frogs, and monkeys carousing with each other, if you must know. And not carousing in that way.)
The scrolls are housed in a very traditional-looking wooden building (that's my technical term for it) with lovely greenery surrounding it.
Jingo-ji is supposed to be the most famous of the three temples in Takao, but I have to say it was my least favorite in terms of scenery. Its buildings are spread out through a wide, open (i.e. not very tree-filled) area.
The trees around there—at least in the parts that we saw—weren’t dense enough or orange enough for good picture-taking. The climb to Jingo-ji, though, was an excellent way to work off lunch. There are a good few sets of long, steep stone steps that take you up a mountain before you reach the temple.
You do pass by a few udon restaurants on the way, though, which pretty much makes up for everything.
My favorite temple of the three was Saimyo-ji. The scenery there was so beautiful, that I found myself saying over and over again, “This is so beautiful, this is so beautiful” and feeling completely unsatisfied with that word. The greens and oranges and reds there were simply dazzling. And it wasn’t even the height of the fall foliage season yet!
Saimyo-ji also felt the most intimate out of the three temples. All of its temple buildings are close together in a fairly small, park-like area, with a friendly dirt path leading you through the temple grounds.
One of the highlights of the day was our lunch at a traditional restaurant by the river in Takao. We found the restaurant at random on our way to Saimyo-ji—which is really one of my favorite ways to figure out where to eat when traveling, through stumbling. We ate in one of the restaurant’s rustic wooden buildings overlooking the river (the restaurant has a handful of these small buildings by the river; each building is the size of a small room and has one wall of sliding doors that is left open to let in the air). We sat on the tatami floor, by large, open windows, with a view of the maple trees and the rushing water below.
Lunch was a multi-course feast of sweet river trout in a glazed sauce, a small salted fish that kept staring grudgingly at me, small appetizers (preserved veggies, tofu, the usual), and some seasonal small plates, including unagi over rice in a hollowed-out section of bamboo. The food, the river, the tatami, the maple trees—all gave me one of those, “OMFG, I really am in Japan” moments, where I want to laugh and kind of want to weep—in a very joyous way—at the same time.
After lunch, we took pictures around the paths near the restaurant—which was yet another one of my favorite parts of the day.
Below: Pictures from near the restaurant and also more pictures from Saimyo-ji
