Gion

The Gion-machi Minamigawa district council — the residents, the ochaya association, the geiko association and Kennin-ji together — installed notice boards on the private lanes prohibiting photography and entry, using a Kyoto City subsidy scheme for reconciling tourism with residents' daily life. The wording of the district's own message is blunt: this is a place where people live and work, not a theme park.

Two penalties sit behind it, and neither is specific to photography. Obstructing a public road is an offence under national law carrying a fine of up to $312 (¥50,000); littering carries up to $187 (¥30,000) under city ordinance. What actually happens to a visitor blocking a private lane is that a resident asks them to leave.

• Hanamikoji — the wide stone-paved street south of Shijo — is public. Walk it, photograph the street, do not photograph into doorways.
• The narrow lanes off it are private property. The signs mean what they say; there is nothing at the end of them but somebody's front door.
• Never stop a maiko or geiko to photograph them, touch a sleeve or block their path. They are late for a paid appointment, always.
• Shirakawa, north of Shijo along the canal, is public, prettier, and where the guided walks start for exactly that reason.
• Yasaka Shrine and Maruyama Park at the east end are open at any hour and free.

Shirakawa is the one to walk first: a stone-flagged lane along a shallow canal with willows and low wooden buildings, north of Shijo and one street back from the traffic. In the twenty minutes after sunset it does everything the postcards promise, with a fraction of the crowd of the famous street.

Hanamikoji runs south from Shijo past the ochaya to Kennin-ji, and is the wide, lantern-lit stone street in every photograph of Gion. It is also where the crowd is, from about 17:00 to 20:00.

Ponto-cho, technically across the river rather than in Gion, is a single alley barely two metres wide running parallel to the Kamo, packed with restaurants at every price. It is the eating street, and the one where a table without a reservation is genuinely possible before 18:00.

Nene-no-Michi and Ishibei-koji, climbing east towards Kodai-ji, are quiet stone lanes that most visitors miss entirely, and the natural link between Gion and Kiyomizu-dera.

Kennin-ji, at the bottom of Hanamikoji

Kyoto's oldest Zen temple, founded 1202, sits at the southern end of the street: dry gardens, a twin-dragon ceiling painted in 2002 for the 800th anniversary, and a copy of the Wind and Thunder Gods screen whose original is in the national museum. It charges a modest admission at the gate and is almost empty at the hour when Hanamikoji outside is shoulder to shoulder.

In the morning Gion is a delivery zone: shutters down, vans in the lanes, nothing to see. In the afternoon it is a shopping street. From about half an hour before sunset the lanterns come on, the crowd builds, and the ochaya start receiving guests — that is the district functioning, and it is the hour to be here.

Geiko and maiko move to their first engagements roughly between 17:30 and 18:30, and again late in the evening when they finish. You may see one crossing a street; you will not see one posing. Anyone in full kimono and white make-up standing still for photographs in the middle of the afternoon is a tourist who has paid for a makeover, which is a perfectly good thing to do and is not the same thing.

The Keihan line's Gion-Shijo station comes out on the west edge of the district, a two-minute walk from Hanamikoji, and the Hankyu line's Kyoto-Kawaramachi is five minutes further across the bridge. From Kyoto Station, city bus 100 or 206 runs to Gion in about twenty minutes in normal traffic and considerably longer in the evening rush — the train is more reliable. On foot, Gion is twenty minutes from Kiyomizu-dera through the Higashiyama lanes, which is by far the best way to arrive.

The eastern chain runs downhill: Kiyomizu-dera at opening, the stone lanes, Kodai-ji, Yasaka Shrine, and Gion as the light goes. Arriving in Gion at two in the afternoon and walking uphill afterwards inverts both the light and the crowd.

That downhill order is how the one-day route is built, and it puts dinner in Ponto-cho at the end of it without a bus ride.