Arashiyama Bamboo Forest Photos: The 8 Spots, and the Lane You Cannot Walk

Eight frames, in the order you would walk them from JR Saga-Arashiyama. Times are the clock windows that work, not opening hours.

1. The main path, shot uphill

Start at the southern entrance near Nonomiya and shoot back up the slope rather than down it. The path narrows as it climbs, so the culms converge and the gravel leads the eye; the reverse angle flattens everything.

The window is brutal and short. At 07:00 you have it to yourself. At 08:00 there are perhaps ten people and gaps to wait for. By 09:30 a clean frame requires patience most visitors do not have, and by 10:00 it is gone until late afternoon.

The grove sits at 35.0168°N, 135.6716°E if you are dropping a pin for a pre-dawn taxi, and the southern entrance is the one closest to Nonomiya Shrine.

2. Nonomiya Shrine

The shrine at the south entrance carries a black wooden torii, the kuroki style, standing against a wall of green. It photographs well precisely because it gives the eye something dark and geometric in a frame that is otherwise all vertical lines.

It is a working shrine with people praying at it, so keep back from the offering hall and do not photograph anyone at the water basin.

3. The Sagano railway crossing

Halfway up the main path, a single track cuts across the grove at a level crossing. Bamboo on both sides, rails vanishing into it, and if you wait a few minutes a Sagano train comes through. It is the most cinematic frame in Arashiyama and most people photograph the crossing sign and walk on.

Stand well back from the rails, keep off the track bed, and let the barriers do their job. Trains here run from 9:02, so an early start means waiting or coming back.

4. The upper path, past the crossing

Cross the track and the crowd halves, then halves again. This upper stretch has the same bamboo and almost none of the people, because the majority of visitors turn around at the Okochi-Sanso gate and walk back down.

If you arrive late and everything below is a queue, this is where to go. At 14:00 on a Saturday it is still walkable, which is not true of anywhere else in the grove.

5. Okochi-Sanso Villa

The ¥1,000 ticket at the top of the path buys twenty thousand square metres of hillside garden with moss, stone lanterns, bamboo along the upper paths and a viewpoint over the whole of Kyoto. It is the only place in the district where you get bamboo and a wide landscape in the same frame.

It also has the crowd problem solved for you: the ticket price alone thins the flow to a trickle. Keep the stub, since it is what you exchange for matcha at the teahouse.

6. Tenryu-ji's Sogenchi pond

Be at the gate when it opens at 08:30, pay ¥500, and walk straight to the pond. For about fifteen minutes the water is still and the hillside behind it reflects cleanly, before enough people arrive to put ripples and hats in the picture.

This is also the smartest route into the grove: leave by the temple's north gate and you enter the bamboo path halfway along, past the bottleneck at the southern entrance.

7. Togetsukyo Bridge at sunset

The 155 metre Moon Crossing Bridge, Heian in origin and rebuilt in the 1930s, sits with the Arashiyama mountains directly behind it. Shoot from the north bank looking south-west in the last half hour of light, with the river taking the colour of the sky.

In November the hillside behind the bridge turns and this becomes the most photographed frame in western Kyoto, which is worth knowing before you plan on having space to set up.

8. The Kimono Forest at dusk

Ten minutes from the grove, the tram station is ringed by about 600 pillars of Kyo-yuzen fabric with an LED inside each one. In daylight it is a curiosity; after dark it is the best colour photograph in the district and there is nobody there, because the day crowd has gone home.

Rain makes it: the wet paving doubles every pillar. Details are in our guide to the Kimono Forest.

The photograph in your head, the one where bamboo presses in from both sides with no gap and no people, is usually taken on a narrow lane inside the grove that is reserved for rickshaw passengers. Walkers are not permitted on it. That is not a rule anybody publicises and it is the single most common source of disappointment here.

Ebisuya runs the service, at ¥9,000 for one passenger or ¥10,000 for two on a thirty-minute Bamboo Forest course, roughly $57 and $64. The drivers stop at the good points and photograph you with your own camera, which is most of what you are paying for. Whether that is worth two-thirds of a guided half-day tour is a judgement only you can make, but at least make it knowing the lane exists.

Everything else in the grove is open to anyone at any hour, which our guide to the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest lays out in full, along with the walks that reach the path before the crowd.

The grove is a high-contrast subject in bright sun and an easy one under cloud. Overcast days and light rain produce the even, saturated green that the postcards have; midday sun punches white holes between the culms that no editing recovers.

• Shoot wide, 16 to 24 mm equivalent, and get low to exaggerate the height
• Under cloud, expose for the highlights between the stalks and lift the shadows later
• Phones: turn off the ultra-vivid photo modes, which turn bamboo an unnatural yellow-green
• A polariser cuts the sheen off wet leaves and deepens the green more than any slider
• Blue hour, 20 to 30 minutes after sunset, is the last usable light without a tripod

Etiquette that is actually enforced

Tripods block a path that is barely two people wide, and at busy hours staff and residents will ask you to move on. Drones are prohibited in the grove at any hour. The bamboo is living property of the temples and the households whose gardens back onto it, and carving initials into culms has become common enough that signs now name it in four languages.

None of this is heavy-handed by Kyoto standards. Turn up early, keep the tripod folded when the path fills, and nobody will trouble you.

For the timing behind all of this, our hour-by-hour guide to the Arashiyama Bamboo Forest sets out when each window opens and closes.

Settings that work, by frame

Nothing here needs an expensive camera. It needs the right exposure decision for a subject that is mostly vertical lines in mixed light.

If you only get the middle of the day

Plenty of visitors reach Arashiyama at noon because a train from Osaka or a morning temple ran long. The frames that still work then are the upper path beyond the crossing, the Okochi-Sanso garden where the ticket price thins the crowd, and the Sogenchi pond at Tenryu-ji from an angle that keeps the far bank in the water.

What does not work is the lower main path, at any focal length, with any amount of patience. Come back for it at 16:30, when the coach groups leave and the light turns sideways, or accept that your bamboo photograph will have forty people in it. Timing is covered hour by hour in our timing guide, and the fee breakdown covers which of these spots charge.