Kyoto with Kids
Places to break up the temples
A day of temples is a lot for small children, so mix in a few of these. The aquarium's in Umekoji Park with the Kyoto Railway Museum next door, a 15-minute walk west of Kyoto Station, and the museum's steam train ride is ¥300 on top of entry. In Arashiyama, a 20-minute climb gets you up to about 120 wild monkeys at Iwatayama. Kids don't pay at Kyoto City Zoo up to junior high age, and the Kyoto University Museum is free if you're under 18. The Kamogawa Delta's stepping stones, some shaped like turtles, cost nothing.
9 places
Year round When
The places
Museum · Kyoto Station Kyoto Aquarium An aquarium in Umekoji Park that opened in March 2012. Its river zone recreates the upper to lower reaches of the Yura River, home to Japanese giant salamanders, a special natural monument. The jellyfish room shows about 30 kinds around a 360-degree tank called GURURI, and bottlenose dolphins perform in the stadium.
Museum · Kyoto Station Kyoto Railway Museum A railway museum next to Umekoji Park that opened on 29 April 2016, with steam locomotives still in working order. The SL Steam ride pulls a coach 1 km out and back behind a real steam engine, and after the last run you can watch the locomotive turn on the turntable in the middle of the roundhouse.
Park · Kyoto Station Umekoji Park Umekoji Park is 13.7 hectares of lawns, play areas and woods a 15-minute walk west of Kyoto Station, open since 1995, with the aquarium in its grounds and the railway museum next door. Its Suzaku no Niwa garden was built for the capital's 1,200th anniversary. Its pond is just 1 cm of water over black granite, so the whole pond works as a mirror, and its 6 m waterfall is the biggest in central Kyoto.
Museum · Shijo-Karasuma Kyoto International Manga Museum The manga museum fills an early Showa school building, the former Tatsuike Elementary School, with about 50,000 manga on 200 metres of open shelves. You can take any of them down and read. Shonen titles are on the first floor, shojo on the second and seinen on the third, and there's a corner of translated manga from around the world.
Museum · Okazaki Kyoto City Zoo Kyoto City Zoo opened in Okazaki Park on 1 April 1903, starting with 238 animals of 61 species. It's a short walk from Heian Shrine and the Okazaki museums, so it fits easily into a day in the area.
Museum · Ginkakuji Kyoto University Museum Kyoto University's museum holds about 2.6 million specimens and objects, and its permanent galleries cover natural history, cultural history and the history of technology. On some Saturdays graduate students run the Children's Museum, explaining the exhibits in conversation with visitors, and adults are welcome too.
Park · Arashiyama Iwatayama Monkey Park About 120 wild Japanese macaques live on Mount Iwata, just across the river from central Arashiyama. A 20-minute climb, starting with 120 steps, takes you up to the rest hut at 160 m, where the monkeys hang around and the whole city spreads out below. On a clear day you can pick out Kyoto Tower.
Park · Imperial Palace Kyoto Gyoen Kyoto Gyoen is the park around the Imperial Palace, 1.3 km long and 700 m wide. More than 140 princely and noble houses stood here in the Edo period, and what's left is lawns, woods more than a century old and the remains of a few old gardens, among about 100,000 trees. It never closes and it's free.
Park · Demachiyanagi Kamogawa Delta The Kamo and Takano rivers meet at Demachiyanagi in a triangle of riverbank known as the Kamogawa Delta. Its stepping stones, some shaped like turtles and birds, are what it's famous for, and at weekends it fills with families and students from Kyoto and Doshisha universities. It turns up in plenty of TV dramas and anime, so some people come just for that.
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