There are two small Japanese gardens that visitors walking towards Todaji Temple will go past: Isuien, Yoshikien Garden. Both are literally beside each other, separated by fences. We visited both in 2010, and liked the latter more – so that got included back into our 2022 itinerary. We were the only visitors to Yoshikien at 9:15AM and had pretty much the entire place to ourselves. In fact, we saw tour groups walking past Yoshikien making their way to Todaji, seemingly entirely oblivious to this gem.
The entrance booth was manned by an elderly Japanese lady who looked thrilled to practice her English on us as she explained – with the help of a printed map – the interesting bits of the garden. The garden is as lovely as we remember it from 12 years ago, and made even the better because of how serenely quiet the area was. We spent almost an hour here – more than we did in 2010. Best of all, there was no admission fee.
Continuing on: the Todaji Temple grounds is another 15 minutes walk from Yoshikien Garden. The place is easy to find: just follow the crowds! The grounds is free for visitors to explore; but to enter into the Todai-ji Daibutsuden – Great Buddha Hall – you’d need to pay an admission fee (¥600 for adults). The temple from the outside is spectacular though, so we were contended to view the temple exterior from the admission gallery, take our requisite pictures, before continuing on. There was overcast weather and snowing lightly later in the area during our trip 12 years ago, so the pictures this year look far less gloomy.
The deer do also roam freely inside the temple grounds, if you haven’t already gotten your deer feeding fix in the deer park itself, this is another – very large – area for you to give it a go.
We wrapped our Nara itinerary an hour ahead of our schedule: so made our way back to Nara station, lunched, then headed to our next city – Uji. Continued in the next post!