Immediately, after checking into a hotel, many visitors wanted to get a general sense of the city before they began sightseeing. The most popular method was to find a high point from which to look down panoramically over Kyoto, identifying key temples and shrines, mapping out prospective itineraries with the eye, and evaluating the beauty of the scene. 

Kyoto’s basin-like topography (displayed here using a map of the city from c.1890), in which the city gradually declines from the northern, eastern and western hills, meant that travellers found themselves unable to visual apprehend the cityscape upon arrival in the south, whether alighting at the Fushimi riverboat wharf or, from 1877, coming by train to Shichijō railway station. Conveniently, however, that same natural topography afforded a number of excellent viewing platforms in the Higashiyama area, the eastern hills that provided the location for some of the earliest Western-style hotels. Thus Kyoto, at least in the early to mid-Meiji period, compared positively to Tokyo, a comparatively flat city of low-rise buildings, where travellers often complained about the difficulty of achieving a bird’s eye view: “I have vainly hunted,” wrote Alexander Graf von Hübner, “for some culminating spot from whence one could look down on this immense town [Tokyo] as a whole. The lay of the ground and the absence of high towers prevent you seeing anything but a small portion of it at any one time” (1874, 408).

Views of Kyoto from the eastern hills were not outside the city's aesthetic geography — the scenery from the rokuami restaurants and tea houses of Anyōji temple was extolled in Edo-period guides. But, in contrast to views of Higashiyama, they were not part of the traditional pictorial lexicon, as evidenced in both meisho-zue (名所図会) guidebooks like Karaku meishō-zue Higashiyama no bu (花洛名勝図会東山之部, 1864) and Yamamoto Kakuma's (山本覚馬) English-language Celebrated Places (1873).

Views from the Eastern Hills

This began to change with the advent of modern tourism, as guidebooks directed tourists to key viewpoints in the eastern hills, from which panoramas of the city were framed in word-pictures, sketches, paintings and photographs, before being reproduced in tourist literature for other potential visitors to see (cf. Takagi 2020). Private tourism operators, particularly the Higashiyama hotels with balconies and veranda, promoted themselves using views in advertising. Also, from the 1910s, views were marketed to foreign visitors by government agencies: at first, Japan Government Railways and Japan Tourist Bureau, then from 1930, the Bureau of Tourist Industry and the Kyoto City Tourism Bureau.