Gates

Hiroshi Yashida, 1935 (source)

Nowadays the front gate is where tourists queue to buy their entrance tickets. You can see the tide of visitors pooling here before they pass through and surge up the steps to the sight they’ve come to see. It’s a tollbooth.

In the old days, the gate marked much more than that. When people entered the gate, they believed that it made an absolute divide between the outside and inside. At the gate, you reached the end of your journey to get here; and the start of a new, internal journey.

• Alex Kerr, Another Kyoto (link)