Toei Kyoto Studio Park

Toei Kyoto Studio Park is the only place in Japan where a film studio's working backlot doubles as a theme park — and since the studio in question spent seventy years producing the nation's samurai cinema and TV (the jidaigeki period dramas that run nightly to this day), the backlot is a complete Edo-period town: merchant streets, a red-light quarter gate, canal, magistrate's office, all built to shoot from any angle and therefore convincingly real from every one. Productions still film here — sections rope off when cameras roll, which is the opposite of a disappointment; watching a take with extras in topknots checking their phones between setups is the park at its best.

The programming leans in with conviction: scheduled sword-fight (chanbara) shows where stunt actors demonstrate and then teach the choreography, a ninja-trick house of revolving walls and hidden passages, costume rental that turns visitors into strolling geisha and ronin for the day (the commitment of Japanese visitors to this is total and improves everyone's photos), haunted house, and a shuriken range. It's pitched at families and lands with everyone who ever watched a samurai film — the streets themselves, empty in the morning before the shows start, photograph like the movies because they are the movies.

Practical notes: it sits in Uzumasa, western Kyoto, twenty minutes from the centre on the Randen tram (the last hundred metres are through pleasingly ordinary suburbs) and pairs geographically with Arashiyama, one tram line away, for a western-Kyoto day that balances temples with theatre. Three hours covers the shows and streets; costume rental adds an hour and is the thing people wish they'd done. Buy the dated entry online — modest saving, and holiday weekends cap. Show schedules post at the gate; organise the visit around the sword-fight demonstration, which is genuinely skilled and funnier than it needs to be.