Kyoto's Secret Places

Walk down the Saga Toriimoto Preserved Street, through a grand red torii gate, and deep into the northern hills of Arashiyama, and you'll eventually reach Otagi Nenbutsu-ji — a temple quietly gathering popularity in recent years after centuries of being one of Kyoto's lesser-known sites.

What makes it extraordinary is who carved its 1,200 stone Rakan statues: not professional sculptors, but ordinary visitors who responded to the call of a former chief priest, himself a Buddhist sculptor and restorer, when he relocated this once-abandoned temple here. Every statue carries a different face, pose, and personality — some laughing, some sleeping, some holding musical instruments or small animals.

Because each statue was made by someone without formal training, the collection has a warmth and individuality that more polished, uniform Buddhist statuary often lacks — less a museum of religious art than a field of 1,200 personal gestures.

Gio-ji is a small, unassuming temple in Arashiyama, easy to walk past if you didn't know its garden existed — a carpet of 17 moss species spreads beneath towering maples, threaded by a tiny winding stream, stone lanterns, and a bamboo water fountain.

Its name comes from Gio, a dancer in the Heike Monogatari (The Tale of the Heike), one of Japan's most celebrated war epics, who retreated here as a nun after being cast aside by a powerful lord. The temple's quiet, melancholy atmosphere still carries a trace of that story.

The moss itself shifts dramatically with the seasons — lush and vivid green in spring and summer, framed by fiery maple color in autumn, and starkly beautiful under winter's bare branches.

Adashino Nenbutsu-ji holds roughly 8,000 stone Buddhist statues, collected over centuries from abandoned and forgotten graves across the Adashino area, where the dead were once laid to rest beyond the edge of the ancient capital.

Arranged in dense, solemn rows, the statues create a genuinely striking, almost otherworldly scene — not a tourist attraction built for spectacle, but a real memorial site that still holds a yearly Buddhist service for the souls they represent.

Each August, the temple hosts the Sentou Kuyou memorial service, lighting candles among the statues after dark — a rare chance to see the site in an entirely different, more intimate light than during a typical daytime visit.