Kyoto Dawn Drive
Empty streets, torii gates and temple walls: Kyoto rolling past at first light.
Moving camera: its position on the map is approximate.
About this view
A dawn drive through Kyoto, live from the past, Japan's imperial capital from 794 until 1868, a city that still holds roughly 1,600 Buddhist temples and 400 Shinto shrines inside the grid the court laid out twelve centuries ago. Ambient lofi replaces the engine; the streets are nearly empty.
What passes the windscreen is the city tourists queue for, unpeopled: machiya townhouses with their wooden lattices, vermilion shrine gates catching the first light, the bridges over the Kamo river, a taxi or a delivery bike and almost nothing else.
Dawn is the only hour Kyoto is like this: the city now hosts tens of millions of visitors a year, and by mid-morning its famous lanes are shoulder to shoulder. This is the quiet version, on demand.
