Kyoto City GuideAbout Kyoto City Guide
An independent, unofficial guide to visiting Kyoto — what to see, what it costs at the gate, and how to spend one, two or three days without losing an hour a day to the wrong bus. We are not Kyoto City, not the Kyoto City Tourism Association, not Kinkaku-ji, Kiyomizu-dera, Nijo Castle or any temple office, and not a tour operator or ticket seller. We sell nothing. The guide starts on the Kyoto city guide homepage, and every figure on the site carries the date it was read.
Why this site exists
Kyoto punishes a vague plan in three specific ways. Almost nothing is bookable — the temples sell at a window, so the numbers that matter are hours and closed days rather than availability, and they are scattered across two thousand institutional websites, many of them Japanese-only. The city withdrew its bus-only day pass on 30 September 2023, and a large share of the advice online still recommends it. And the two headline temples are on opposite sides of the city, about fifty minutes apart by bus in the traffic of the hour everybody travels.
So every price, hour and closed day here is read off the official page of the building itself and stamped with the date it was read. Where the official source does not state something — and Kiyomizu-dera, for one, does not publish its admission fee anywhere on its own site — we say so instead of borrowing a figure from somebody's blog.
Where the information comes from
Opening hours, closed days, ticket names and admission prices come from the institutions themselves: shokoku-ji.jp for Kinkaku-ji and Ginkaku-ji, kiyomizudera.or.jp, sanjusangendo.jp, ryoanji.jp, tenryuji.com, toji.or.jp, inari.jp, kuramadera.or.jp and nijo-jocastle.city.kyoto.lg.jp. Transport fares, the day passes and the accommodation tax come from Kyoto City's own pages at city.kyoto.lg.jp, and event dates from the city's official tourism service at kyoto.travel. Tour prices, ratings and review counts are GetYourGuide's own published numbers, read on the date printed beside them.
The weather table is not taken from anywhere: it is computed here from the Open-Meteo ERA5 reanalysis for the city centre over 1995–2024. Where two official pages contradict each other we take the more specific one and say which.
What we do not claim
There is no invented author here, no character who lives in a particular quarter and no claim that someone from this site stood in a particular queue on a particular morning. We do not operate or personally conduct these tours, and we do not inspect museums or audit any operator.
We also hold no bookings. Every Check Availability button hands you to the platform the tour is sold on, where the price, the terms and the cancellation window are theirs. Official ticket offices are linked plainly, without any tracking on the link, whenever buying direct is the better move — which for several of the Kyoto tickets covered here it is.
How the site pays for itself
Tour and activity links on this site are affiliate links: book through one and the platform pays us a commission, at the same price you would have paid going there yourself. That pays for the research and buys nothing else — not placement, not a rating, not the wording of a recommendation. Where the official ticket office is cheaper or the only sensible option, the page says so even though that link earns nothing.
The mechanics are set out on the affiliate disclosure page.
Corrections
Museum hours in Kyoto change with the season, ticket systems get renamed and prices move every year. If a number here is out of date, write to us with what you found and when you were there. A corrected figure is worth more than a defended one.