{"id":32916,"date":"2022-12-12T21:22:23","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T13:22:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/?p=32916"},"modified":"2026-03-12T22:01:16","modified_gmt":"2026-03-12T14:01:16","slug":"day-02-nara-yoshikien-garden-and-todaji-temple","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/2022\/12\/12\/day-02-nara-yoshikien-garden-and-todaji-temple\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 02 @ Nara – Yoshikien Garden and Todaji Temple"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are two small Japanese gardens that visitors walking towards Todaji Temple will pass: Isuien and Yoshikien Garden<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

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Yoshikien Garden, Isuien Garden right beside it, and the road continues to Todaji.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 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.<\/p>\n

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Continuing on: the Todaji Temple<\/strong> grounds are another 15-minute walk from Yoshikien Garden. The place is easy to find: just follow the crowds! The grounds are free for visitors to explore; but to enter the Todai-ji Daibutsuden – Great Buddha Hall – you’d need to pay an admission fee (\u00a5600 for adults). The temple from the outside is spectacular though, so we were content to view the temple exterior from the admission gallery, take our requisite pictures, and then continue on. There was overcast weather and light snow later in the area during our trip 12 years ago, so the pictures this year look far less gloomy.<\/p>\n

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Free to view from afar, costs \u00a5600 to go inside.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The deer 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.<\/p>\n

We wrapped up our Nara itinerary an hour ahead of schedule, so we made our way back to Nara Station, had lunch, then headed to our next city – Uji. Continued in the next post!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are two small Japanese gardens that visitors walking towards Todaji Temple will pass: Isuien and Yoshikien Garden. Both are literally beside each other, separated by fences. We visited both in 2010 and liked the latter more – so that<\/p>\n

Read More Day 02 @ Nara – Yoshikien Garden and Todaji Temple<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":32957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[673],"class_list":["post-32916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-traveling","tag-kansai-japan-2022","wpcat-17-id"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/blog-2022-japan-kansai-day-02-A7_09643-nara.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32916"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":38396,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32916\/revisions\/38396"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/32957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chekyang.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}