I visited Japan in November 2025. Japan is a highly urbanised, highly industrialised country: mountainous and heavily wooded for the most part, its mega cities occupy the plains around its coast line. The average age of housing and commercial property in Tokyo however is just 28 and 30 years respectively and it has an exceptionally well developed infrastructure of expressways and rail.

 

My tour took us from Tokyo for four days around the national parks and lakes around Mount Fuji: Lake Kawaguchi, Arakurayama Park, and Lakes Yamanaka and Ontake. From there to the Kiso valley and the Narai Post town and ‘heritage’ villages such as Shirakawago-Minkaen. From there in steps to Kyoto, visiting the Kiyomizu and Eikando Temples, the Nishiki market, the Gion district for a meal and photo op with a Geisha, and various locations and temples around the bamboo forest. Two locations we visited are worth a particular note:

 

Firstly a note on the ‘torii’, a traditional Japanese gate most commonly found at the entrance of or within a Shinto shrine, where it symbolically marks the transition from the mundane to the sacred and a spot where ‘kami’ (A spirit or deity) are welcomed and thought to travel through. The presence of a torii at the entrance is usually the simplest way to identify Shinto shrines. Toriigates are mentioned in a text written as early as 922 and were traditionally made from wood or stone, but today they can be also made of reinforced concrete, stainless steel and other materials. They are usually either unpainted or painted vermilion with a black upper lintel. Shrines of ‘Inari’, the ‘kami’ of fertility and industry, typically have many torii because those who have been successful in business often donate torii in gratitude. 

 

The Fushimi Inari-taisha, which is the head shrine of the kami Inari, is located in Fushimi-ku, Kyoto. The shrine sits at the base of a mountain and includes trails up the mountain to many smaller shrines which span 4 km and take approximately 2 hours to walk up. Each of its roughly 10,000 torii were donated by a Japanese business, and approximately 800 of these are set in a row to form the Senbon Torii, creating the impression of a tunnel. The shrine is said to have ten thousand such gates in total that designate the entrance to the holy domain of kami and protect it against wicked forces. The shrine gained imperial patronage early on. In 965, Emperor Murakami decreed that messengers carry written accounts of important events to the guardian kami of Japan. These heihaku were initially presented to 16 shrines, including the Inari Shrine. From 1871 through 1946, Fushimi Inari-taisha was officially designated one of the Kanpei-taisha, meaning that it stood in the first rank of government supported shrines. The shrine draws several million worshipers over the Japanese New Year. The main shrine structure was built in 1499. At the bottom of the hill are the main gate and the main shrine. Behind them, in the middle of the mountain, the inner shrine is reachable by a path lined with thousands of torii. On the way to the top of the mountain are tens of thousands of rock altars for private worship. These rock altars are personalised Inari that have been set up there by citizens. Most of them have individual names forInari engraved on them. The custom to donate a torii began spreading from the Edo period (1603–1868) to have a wish come true or in gratitude for a wish that came true, with successive gates being added up to the present day by donors. There are many photos of this shrine in this collection, recognised by the distinctive red torii gates.

There are also photos of the Kinkaku-ji  lit. 'Temple of the Golden Pavilion', officially named Rokuon-ji  lit. 'Deer Garden Temple', which is a Zen Buddhist temple and a major tourist attraction. The temple is nicknamed after its reliquary (shariden), the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku), whose top two floors are coated in gold leaf. The original Golden Pavilion is believed to have been constructed in 1399 although the current pavilion was rebuilt in 1955 after being destroyed in an arson attack.  The site of Kinkaku-ji was originally a villa belonging to a powerful statesman. Its history dates to 1397, when the villa was purchased by the shōgun and transformed into the Kinkaku-ji complex. When he died the building was converted into a Zen temple by his son. The gold employed was intended to mitigate and purify any pollution or negative thoughts and feelings towards death. Other than the symbolic meaning behind the gold leaf, the Muromachiperiod heavily relied on visual excesses: the way that the structure is mainly covered in gold creates an amazing impression because of the effect of the reflection of sunlight on the pond. When we arrived, the weather was dull but we were fortunate that the sun came out for a brief period and I was able to walk back against the torrent of tourists to retake photos to illustrate this!

The 1955 reconstruction is said to be a close copy of the original, although some have questioned whether such an extensive gold-leaf coating was used on the original structure. In 1984, it was discovered that the gold leaf on the reconstructed building had peeled off, and from 1986 to 1987, it was replaced with 0.5 μm gold leaf weighing 20 kg, five times the thickness and ten times the weight of the original. 

From Kyoto we drive to Koyasan high in the mountains above Osaka, where we visit the Okunoin cemetery housing over 200,000 grave stones and some important mausoleums before spending the night at the Sekisho-in Temple monastery lodging (‘Shukubo’) with a brief night shoot at the Danjo-Garan temple. On our last day we visit the waterfall at the Meiji no mori Minoh Kouasi Parkand end at the Dotobori shopping district in Osaka including the famed (?) Glico Running Man billboard.