Why Winter Suits the City of Kyoto

Kyoto in the famous seasons is a victim of its own beauty. Spring brings the cherry blossom and with it a crush of visitors that can turn a temple garden into a scrum; autumn brings the maples turning scarlet and an even greater crowd. Both are genuinely magnificent and both come at a cost the discerning traveller increasingly resents — the queues, the selfie sticks, the sense of a sacred place overrun. And then there is winter, which almost nobody comes for, and which is, to our mind, when the ancient capital is at its most beautiful of all.

Winter gives Kyoto back to itself. The crowds thin to almost nothing, the light turns clear and low, and the city recovers the stillness that its temples and gardens were built to hold. It is the connoisseur’s season, and once you have seen it you will struggle to come at any other time.

The gift of the empty temple

The single greatest argument for winter is space. Kyoto’s temples and gardens were designed as places of contemplation, composed to be experienced in silence and solitude — a raked gravel garden, a moss-covered slope, a view framed by a temple gate. In the high seasons that intention is impossible to honour; you shuffle through in a crowd, straining for a photograph. In winter you can have these places almost to yourself. To stand alone before a great Zen garden on a cold, still morning, with only the sound of your own breath, is to finally understand what the garden is for. It is a completely different, and infinitely deeper, experience, and it is the same reward we describe in why shoulder season beats peak in Kyoto, taken to its logical extreme.

The temples themselves take on a stark, monastic beauty in the cold, stripped of the softening greenery of summer and revealed in their essential lines. The bare maples, the frost on the moss, the low sun through the wooden lattices — it is austere and profoundly moving. A Central European city reveals itself in a similar way under winter skies, as why winter suits the city of Krakow describes.

When it snows

And then, on a lucky day, it snows. Snow does not fall often in Kyoto, but when it does the city becomes something out of a woodblock print. A dusting of white on the temple roofs, on the raked gravel, on the branches of the garden pines, transforms the familiar into the sublime. The golden pavilions and the vermilion shrines against fresh snow are among the most beautiful sights in all of Japan, and the traveller who happens to catch a snowfall in Kyoto has witnessed something the summer crowds never will. It is a matter of luck, but the odds are only available in winter, and the reward is beyond price.

Kyoto was made to be seen in stillness, and winter is the only season that reliably grants it. The cold is a small price for the quiet.

The pleasures of the cold

Winter also unlocks Kyoto’s most comforting rituals, the ones built precisely for the cold. This is the season for the deep, hot bath — the sento and the onsen — where you soak away the chill of a day’s temple-going in steaming mineral water. It is the season for kaiseki, the refined multi-course cuisine, at its most warming and seasonal, built around winter’s roots and greens and the first bitter shoots. It is the season for a bowl of noodles in a steamed-up shop, for hot sake, for the particular pleasure of coming in from the cold. These comforts are woven into Japanese winter culture, and they turn the cold from a hardship into a series of small, deliberate pleasures. To stay in a traditional inn and take these rituals properly is the ideal, a case we make in the case for the ryokan over the resort.

Practical winter

Kyoto’s winter is cold but rarely brutal, and it is easily managed with a little preparation.

• Dress in warm layers. The temples are unheated and you will spend long stretches outdoors; a good coat and warm layers are essential.
• Start early regardless. Even in winter the few remaining crowds gather at the famous sites by mid-morning; the first hour after opening is magical and empty.
• Embrace the indoor pleasures. Build baths, long lunches and tea houses into the day as warming punctuation between the gardens.
• Watch the forecast. If snow is predicted, drop everything and get to a temple garden at dawn.

The reward for a little cold is a city returned to its proper, contemplative self.

Beyond the temples

Winter is also a fine time to appreciate Kyoto’s quieter cultural side — its craft workshops, its design, its old machiya townhouses and the shops and cafés within them — all the more pleasant without the crush. The city’s deep tradition of making and refinement rewards slow, cold-weather wandering, a subject we explore in a design lover’s guide to Kyoto. For where to base yourself through it all, our round-up of the best boutique hotels in Kyoto covers the ground.

There is a practical advantage worth naming, too: winter is far and away the easiest season in which to actually enjoy Kyoto. In spring and autumn the city strains under the weight of its own popularity, and the small frustrations mount — the fully booked restaurants, the queues for a taxi, the temples that charge extra and cap numbers, the sense of competing for every good table and quiet corner. Winter simply dissolves all of this. Reservations open up, the best kaiseki counters have space, the machiya inns are available and often cheaper, and the whole machinery of the city relaxes. You move through Kyoto in winter the way a resident does, without the low-grade stress that the peak seasons impose, and that ease is itself a considerable part of the pleasure. To travel well is very often simply to travel when others do not.

The cold argument

What winter offers the Kyoto traveller is the rarest thing of all in a famous city: the place itself, unmediated by crowds. The empty temples, the possibility of snow, the deep warming rituals of the cold season, and above all the profound stillness that the gardens were built to hold — these are winter’s gifts, and they are available in no other season. Come when nobody else does, wrap up warm, rise with the light, and let the ancient capital give you what it can only give in the cold: silence, space, and the quiet, austere beauty that is Kyoto’s truest self. It is, without question, our favourite way to see it, and part of the wider case for slow, seasonal travel we make throughout our travel and stays writing.