Ginkaku-ji, the Silver Pavilion

You come in through a corridor of clipped camellia hedge two and a half metres high — a deliberate compression before the garden opens out — and the first thing in front of you is not the pavilion but the Ginshadan, the "sea of silver sand": a plateau of raked white gravel with a truncated cone beside it, the Kogetsudai, "moon-viewing platform". Both are raked into shape by hand and reshaped after every heavy rain. Nobody knows for certain when they were added; they are almost certainly later than Yoshimasa, from the Edo period rather than the fifteenth century.

The pavilion itself, the Kannon-den, is two storeys of dark unpainted timber with a phoenix on the roof, and it is closed to visitors. Beyond it the path crosses a pond garden of islands and stones, then climbs a wooded hillside through moss to a viewpoint over the temple roofs and the whole east of the city — the best part of the visit and the one many people cut short. It comes back down past a spring that has run since Yoshimasa's time.

Why there is no silver

Yoshimasa built the villa during the Onin War, the conflict that burned much of Kyoto to the ground in the 1470s, and the money for a silver-foil covering — if it was ever the intention — never appeared. The name Ginkaku-ji, Silver Pavilion, is a later nickname coined in contrast to Kinkaku-ji. What Yoshimasa did leave was Higashiyama culture: the tea ceremony, ink painting, flower arrangement and the four-and-a-half-mat tea room, which took its standard form in the Togu-do hall on this site.

It is not a lesser Golden Pavilion; it is the source of most of what the world thinks of as Japanese aesthetics.

Kinkaku-ji is a photograph: you arrive, the gold is across the pond, you walk a fixed path for twenty-five minutes and leave. Ginkaku-ji is a walk: forty-five minutes of garden with no single spectacular moment and a view at the end. If you have one morning and want the image everybody recognises, the gold one is $3.13 (¥500) and does the job.

If you would rather move slowly through something designed to reward it, this is the better $6.25 (¥1,000) in the city — and you can leave straight down the canal path.

Doing both in one day is entirely reasonable: city bus 204 links Ginkakuji-michi and Kinkakuji-michi in about thirty-five minutes, and that single ride is most of the argument for the $6.88 (¥1,100) day pass.

The nearest stop is Ginkakuji-michi, five to seven minutes below the gate up a lane of souvenir shops.

The Philosopher's Path runs two kilometres south from the temple gate to Nanzen-ji, following a canal lined with cherry trees. Walking it is the natural way to leave, and it turns a forty-five-minute temple visit into a half-day that costs $6.25 (¥1,000).

Ginkaku-ji sits at the northern end of the Higashiyama hills, and the natural direction of travel is downhill and south: temple at opening, the canal path, Nanzen-ji, and into Gion by mid-afternoon. Doing it in reverse means walking two kilometres uphill to arrive at a temple that shuts at 17:00 — or at 16:30 in winter.

That downhill shape is how the two-day itinerary uses it, and the full eastern day covers the same ground with the paid stops priced.