Explore Kyoto in Google Street View

Kyoto was laid out in 794 on a grid copied from the Chinese capital of Chang'an, and that grid is still the reason the city is easy to navigate on a screen. Streets run true north-south and east-west, they are numbered rather than only named, and the mountains close the view at the end of most of them. Drop in anywhere in the centre and you can orient yourself by which way the hills are, which is not true of any other Japanese city.

The imagery here sits lower than it does in Europe or America, and there is a specific reason. Google lowered its camera cars in Japan from 2.45 metres to 2.05 metres in 2009 after complaints that they were photographing over garden walls, and rephotographed the twelve cities already published. That forty-centimetre drop is why Japanese Street View feels closer to eye level, and in Kyoto, where residential lanes are walled and narrow, it changes the whole character of a walk.

A great deal of what is worth seeing here was captured on foot rather than by car, which is the other thing that makes Kyoto unusually rewarding. Shrine approaches, temple gardens and mountain paths are all walkable. Fushimi Inari is the clearest example: the path of vermilion torii gates goes several kilometres up the mountainside behind the shrine, and Street View follows it a long way past the point where most visitors turn back.

The Gion district repays slow movement. It is the surviving machiya quarter, wooden townhouses with narrow frontages and deep interiors, built that way because property was once taxed on street width. Hanamikoji is the street people photograph, but the lanes running off it towards the Shirakawa canal are better and quieter, and the water with the willows over it is one of the few genuinely unchanged views in the city.

For the contrast Kyoto is bad at showing in photographs, open Kyoto Station. Finished in 1997, it is a fifteen-storey steel and glass box with an atrium you can see the sky through, dropped into a city that spends the rest of its time protecting wooden buildings. It was enormously controversial and it is still the first thing most visitors see. Whether you like it or not, it explains something about how the city argues with itself.

Arashiyama, west of the centre, is where the bamboo grove is, and it is worth managing your expectations before you open it. The famous path is a few hundred metres long and it is almost always full of people. What is better in Street View is the area around it: the Togetsukyo bridge over the Katsura river, the temple gardens at Tenryu-ji, and the walk north to Gio-ji where the moss is the point and almost nobody goes.