Kyoto Night Pub Crawl: Pontocho & Gion Hidden Alley Bars Tour
3 bars and izakayaPhotos taken for youLive English guide
From $41 per person
Kyoto Night Districts, One by One: Gion, Pontocho, Kiyamachi and Arashiyama
Short answer. Gion is the one you came for and it is small. Pontocho is where you eat, Kiyamachi is where you drink, Higashiyama is where you photograph, and Arashiyama and Fushimi are separate trips rather than detours. Almost everything except the last two is within fifteen minutes' walk of one station.
Kyoto's evening happens in a handful of districts that behave completely differently once the sun goes down, and they are much closer together than a map suggests. Knowing which is which is the difference between an evening that works and one spent walking between them. Here is what each does, in the order most visitors meet them on a Kyoto Night Tours.
Six districts, and what each of them is actually for once the sun is down.
| District | What it is after dark | Walk from Gion-Shijo |
|---|---|---|
| Gion | Teahouse streets, lantern light, private lanes with rules | 3 minutes |
| Pontocho | One 500 m alley of restaurants and bars | 5 minutes |
| Kiyamachi | The drinking street beside the canal, busier and louder | 6 minutes |
| Higashiyama | Stone slopes up to the floodlit pagoda | 15 minutes uphill |
| Arashiyama | Empty residential lanes and an unlit bamboo grove | 40 minutes by train |
| Fushimi | A shrine with no closing time and no staff after five | 8 minutes by train |
Gion: the district everyone means
Gion sits east of the Kamo River either side of Shijo-dori, and it is the largest of Kyoto's five hanamachi — the districts where geiko and maiko have worked since the Edo period. It is also small enough to cross in ten minutes, and it is a working residential quarter rather than an attraction.
Its main streets are public roads: Hanamikoji running south from Shijo, and the Shirakawa canal lane to the north, which is quieter and prettier and carries a fraction of the foot traffic. Its narrow side alleys are private property, and since April 2024 some have carried no-entry signs with a ¥10,000 penalty attached.
Useful tip. Start north of Shijo on Shirakawa Lane rather than south on Hanamikoji. It is the same district, the willows and the canal photograph better, and there is almost nobody there. Kyoto night attractions has the detail on both.
Pontocho: five hundred metres of alley
Pontocho is one alley running between Shijo-dori and Sanjo-dori, parallel to the river, barely wide enough for two people to pass. It is a hanamachi in its own right, and both sides are lined with restaurants and bars, many of them up staircases with a single small sign at the bottom.
It is the best eating in central Kyoto and the hardest to navigate. Three of the guided evenings covered here spend part of the night in it for exactly that reason.
Kiyamachi: the noisy one
One street west of Pontocho, along the Takase canal, Kiyamachi is where Kyoto goes drinking. It is louder, later and less careful about its appearance, and it is genuinely different in character from the alley beside it. If Pontocho feels like a place where you should lower your voice, Kiyamachi does not.
Higashiyama: the slopes and the pagoda
East and uphill from Gion, Higashiyama is the district of stone lanes, walled temple gardens and the five-storey pagoda of Hōkan-ji, which is floodlit and visible from half the city. Ninenzaka and Nene-no-Michi run through it, and so does the route of almost every Gion walking tour.
It is quiet after dark and it is uphill. The walk from Hanamikoji to the pagoda takes about fifteen minutes and climbs the whole way, on paving that is centuries old.
Arashiyama: forty minutes and a different city
West of the centre, Arashiyama empties completely once the last day-trippers have gone. Its bamboo grove is open around the clock and free, and it has no permanent lighting of any kind, which makes it a genuinely different place at nine in the evening from the one in every photograph.
It is about forty minutes from Gion with a change, or seventeen from Kyoto Station on the JR Sagano line. That is not a detour; it is the evening.
Did you know? The bamboo grove has no lights at all. Every photograph you have seen of it was taken in daylight. After sunset the path is dark enough that torches are the normal way through it.
Fushimi: a shrine that never closes
Eight minutes south of Gion-Shijo on the Keihan line, Fushimi Inari-taisha has no gates and no closing time, and admission is free. The thousands of vermilion torii climbing the mountain behind it carry lamps on the lower stretches and nothing higher up.
At nine in the evening there is almost nobody on them, and nobody staffing the shrine either — the office and shops stop at about five. That combination is what makes a guided walk here a different proposition from a guided walk in Gion.
The river is the dividing line
If you remember one thing about the geography, make it this. The Kamo River runs north to south through the centre, and everything changes as you cross it. East is Gion and Higashiyama: temples, teahouses, stone slopes and rules about where you may walk. West is Pontocho, Kiyamachi, Kawaramachi and Nishiki: restaurants, bars, arcades and no rules at all beyond ordinary manners.
The Keihan line runs under the east bank and the Hankyu line under Shijo-dori, so both sides are a few minutes from a station. Four bridges cross between them in the stretch that matters, and the walk from the middle of Gion to the middle of Pontocho is about five minutes. The meeting-point map has the distances.
Miyagawa-cho and Kamishichiken, the two nobody walks
Kyoto has five hanamachi and most visitors only ever see two of them. Miyagawa-cho sits just south of Shijo on the east bank, a few minutes' walk from Gion and almost empty of visitors; it runs its own dances each spring. Kamishichiken is across the city entirely, opposite Kitano Tenmangu in the north-west, and is the oldest of the five.
Neither is on a guided route, because neither has the foot traffic or the lantern light to carry an evening. They are worth knowing about for a different reason: if you have walked Gion and want the same architecture without anybody else in it, Miyagawa-cho is fifteen minutes away and free.
How to fit them into one evening
- One evening: Gion and Higashiyama, then eat in Pontocho.
- Two evenings: add Arashiyama or Fushimi as the second, not as an extension of the first.
- Three: Gion, then a food evening across Pontocho and Kawaramachi, then one of the two outside the centre.
Things to do on a Kyoto night covers what each of those evenings actually contains, and the map has the walking distances. Whichever order you take them in, planning your night has the last-train times.
Tours that walk these districts
Kyoto Gion Night Walk & Geisha District Guided Tour
Live English guideMax 25Meet at a set point
From $18 per person
Kyoto Ghost Tour: Dark Tales, Urban Legends, Bamboo Forest Night
Drink includedMax 12
From $41 per person