Kyoto Tower

Kyoto Tower is the city's one skyline liberty: a slender white column rising 131 metres directly over the station, built for the 1964 Olympic year in the teeth of preservationist fury, and designed — its architects insisted — as a candle lighting the ancient capital (critics counted the storeys of the "un-Kyoto" base building and disagreed). Sixty years on, the argument has settled into affection: the tower is the meeting point, the way home, and the first thing every arriving traveller sees stepping out of the station's glass cathedral.

Its practical value to a visitor is unique because Kyoto has no other public high view in the city centre — the preservation rules that kept the skyline low made the tower's 100-metre observation deck the only place to read the whole city at once. And Kyoto from above explains itself: the perfect Tang-dynasty grid running to the mountain walls on three sides, temple roofs breaking the tile sea (Higashi Hongan-ji's vast twin halls directly below look close enough to step onto), the Kamo river's line, and on clear days Osaka's towers through the southern gap. Free telescopes and a good annotated panorama do the naming; sunset — mountains going indigo in ranks as the grid lights up — is the slot worth planning.

It's a modest attraction priced accordingly, and it slots into the itinerary exactly where Kyoto needs it: the first evening (orientation before the temple marathon begins) or the last (the city recited one final time before the Shinkansen). The base building's sando food hall does a solid quick dinner, the ticket queue rarely exists, and online entry shaves a little off the door price. Combine with the station building itself — Hiroshi Hara's 1997 steel canyon, its 171-step grand stairway light-show included — for the "modern Kyoto" hour the temple itineraries never schedule.