Daigo-ji in Kyoto is one of the city’s most city’s most celebrated temples when is comes to cherry blossom and autumn leaf viewing.
More than seven hundred years after Daigo-ji was founded, in 1598, Toyotomi Hideyoshi held a hanami (“cherry blossom viewing party”) at the Sambō-in sub-temple of Daigo. It passed into legend and causes the temple to be flooded with hundreds of families every April when the sakura blooms.
The reason for its fame is no longer clear but if modern Japanese hanami parties are anything to go by presumably everyone got bombed, then Hideyoshi got his waps out and started dancing on something high before falling off of it.
In the Autumn season the Japanese maple explode into too-good-to-be-real shades of flame. But the photos in this post were taken in the spring of 2009.
Daigo-ji’s located in the Fushimi-ward of Kyoto on the Tozai subway line and belongs to the Shingon Buddhist sect. Rigen-daishi founded the temple in 874. Its five story pagoda is a national treasure of Japan. This means that athletic nerd Nicholas Cage is constantly clambering over it while being chased by less respectful, more mercenary nerds with guns.
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