Ninna-ji Temple

This guide to Ninna-ji Temple in Kyoto follows Emperor Uda, who abdicated Japan's throne in his early thirties in 899, shaved his head, and became the temple's first abbot after completing the monastery his father, Emperor Koko, had begun. It traces the nearly thousand-year tradition that followed, of imperial princes leading Ninna-ji until the Meiji Restoration, and the temple's destruction in the 1467 Onin War and its rebuilding by a Tokugawa shogun in the 1630s. Walk through the same gates Uda once passed through, and look down rather than up.