Kyoto has around sixteen hundred Buddhist temples, four hundred Shinto shrines and seventeen UNESCO World Heritage sites – and that number is the single biggest threat to your holiday. Everybody arrives with a list of twelve places and leaves having queued at eight of them.

Here is the thing I most want you to know, because it changes everything: the Kyoto in the photographs genuinely exists. Wet stone lanes, lanterns still lit, a monk sweeping, nobody else out. It just lives between about six and eight in the morning, and again after five in the evening – and almost nobody gets up for it. Set one alarm and the city is yours.

It was the imperial capital for over a thousand years and escaped the firebombing that flattened most of Japan, which is why whole streets of wooden machiya houses are still standing, and also why it now receives rather more visitors than it can comfortably hold. None of that should put you off for a second. It should simply change how you go: fewer places, much earlier mornings, and a long lunch in the middle of every day.