Larger than life.
This is the immediate feeling I had when I stumbled upon Nanzenji Sanmon Gate on my first day in Kyoto. In the late afternoon sun, fresh off the Shinkansen from Tokyo, I opted for a stroll around the city. In what has since become a tradition for me, I walked out the front of my hotel and opted to go right and get lost.
And I got lost.
I turned a corner, and there it was. I hadn’t looked it up in any guidebooks, nor had I planned for it. Just a gate, suddenly filling my entire field of view.
What You Actually See
The Sanmon is enormous. Dark timber, a layered roof that seems to go on forever, framed on both sides by maple trees that in April are this almost impossibly vivid shade of green. The kind of green that doesn’t look real until you’re standing in front of it.
But the thing that stopped me, as a photographer, was the light. Late afternoon sun was coming through the base of the gate at ground level, completely backlit, turning the people walking through it into silhouettes. Groups in yukata. A couple of solo walkers. Someone sitting on the stone steps with no particular urgency. Nobody performing for a camera. Just people existing in a place that happened to be extraordinary.
I stood there longer than made sense. The light was doing what it sometimes does when you don’t plan for it, which is absolutely everything.
Go Right and Get Lost
There’s no better country to get lost in than Japan. No matter where you go, you stumble upon something that makes you want to understand more. To dig a little deeper into the cultural and spiritual weight that quietly sits behind everything you’re looking at.
Kyoto especially. It earns its reputation the moment you stop navigating and start wandering. The Bamboo Forest at Arashiyama, Fushimi Inari with its thousand torii gates winding up the mountain, the hidden laneways at night that feel like a city within a city. None of it demands your attention. It just waits for you to slow down enough to notice.
The Sanmon was the first thing Kyoto showed me. It set the tone for everything that followed.
I didn’t plan that. I just went right.
