Kinkaku-ji Temple

The ground this pavilion stands on was a private retirement estate before it was ever a temple. In 1397 the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu bought a villa here that had belonged to a court aristocrat and rebuilt it into a lavish complex called Kitayama-dono, where he lived out his retirement from actual rule while continuing to run the country informally from the sidelines. Only after his death, and per his own wishes, was the villa converted into the Zen temple it remains today — the golden pavilion visitors see was originally built for a man to relax in, not to pray in.

What stands there now isn't the original building. On 2 July 1950, a 22-year-old novice monk named Hayashi Shoken set fire to the pavilion and then attempted suicide on the hillside behind it; he survived, was sentenced to prison, and was released early after his mental illness was recognized, dying of tuberculosis not long after. The event became famous well beyond Japan's Buddhist community because the novelist Yukio Mishima turned it into the basis of his 1956 novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which explores the monk's motives at a depth the historical record never fully settled.

The pavilion was rebuilt between 1952 and 1955 as a careful copy of the original — but a later restoration went further than replication. In the 1980s, workers reapplied the gold leaf roughly five times thicker than what had covered the building before the fire, using around 20 kilograms of gold. The building visitors photograph today is, by that measure, more lavishly gilded than the one Yoshimitsu himself ever lived beside.

Getting there

Located in Kamigyō-ku. Osaka Itami International Airport (ITM) is about 39 km away.