Kyoto with Children,
in Three Days.

The plan opens at 14:00, not 06:00. Drop the bags at the hotel; walk fifteen minutes to Maruyama Park for the cherry-tree alley and the central pond. The children run; you sit. Dinner is okonomiyaki at a counter where they cook on the table in front of you — Issen Yoshoku in Gion, since 1928, the menu is one dish.

Bed by 20:30. Tomorrow is the mountain.

The Hankyū line west to Arashiyama; cross the Togetsukyō Bridge on foot — the river is wide here, the cormorants stand on the rocks at low water. The Iwatayama Monkey Park entrance is at the foot of the mountain; the climb is twenty to thirty minutes, paved most of the way, switchbacks at the top. At the summit, a hundred Japanese macaques walk past the bench you are sitting on.

We anchor the climb at 11:00, not 13:00, because the four-year-old's nap landed at 13:30 in the questionnaire. Lunch is on the descent, at a tofu house on the riverbank — Yudofu Sagano, a temple-cuisine restaurant with a children's set that has noodles instead of the harder tofu courses. Afternoon at the hotel for the nap; evening is a slow walk along the Kamogawa.

Morning at Kyoto Railway Museum in Umekōji — three floors, lifts on every floor, a working roundhouse, a Shinkansen 0-series simulator. Three hours indoors is the right amount for a family on the third day. Food court inside; the children's bento is ¥850.

Afternoon: a single temple, Sanjūsangen-dō, which is one long hall with 1,001 statues of Kannon. The hall is step-free, dim, and absolutely quiet — the children walk the length of it in silence. The desk's rule for families is one temple per day, and a short one.