Higashiyama Ward

This guide to Higashiyama Ward in Kyoto follows two old beliefs that shaped how pilgrims moved through these hillside lanes: a curse said to strike anyone who stumbled on the worn stone steps of Sannen-zaka, and a very different tradition just up the hill at Kiyomizu-dera, where worshippers deliberately leapt from a wooden stage forty-three feet above the ground, betting everything on a single jump. Temple records kept a careful count of how those leaps turned out across two centuries.