Who runs this site, and how is the crowd estimated?

Who is behind it?

Arashiyama Bamboo is run by Bag2Gate, which also runsArashiyama Today for the wider Arashiyama area andArashiyama Monkey Park. We are not connected to Kyoto City, Tenryu-ji or any other temple, and nobody pays us to recommend a place.

How is the crowd level worked out?

Nobody counts people on the path for us. Each level is an estimate built in four steps.

1. A typical day: a score from 0 to 100 for each hour, following our estimate of the usual pattern of visitors to the bamboo path.
2. Weekends and Japanese public holidays add 18%.
3. The autumn leaves and cherry blossom peaks add 30%, and the weeks either side add 10%.
4. An hour with 1 mm of rain or more, or a rain chance of 60% or more, is lowered by 20%.

The score then becomes a level: Quiet below 30, Moderate from 30, Busy from 55 and Very busy from 80. All times are Kyoto time, whatever time zone your phone is in.

A tour group, an event or a holiday from another country can change the real crowd in ways the estimate cannot see. The live camera from the Kyoto City Tourism Association shows what it is actually like. The same page has the association's own hour-by-hour forecast, built from phone location data (in Japanese). We used it as a reference when we adjusted our typical day in November 2026, but our estimate is our own and the two can differ.

Where does the weather come from?

Hourly forecasts, sunrise and sunset come from Open-Meteo and are refreshed every hour. If the forecast cannot be loaded, we say so and show when it was last updated, rather than showing old weather as if it were new. If sunrise and sunset are missing, we calculate them instead.

How do you check hours and prices?

We take opening hours, prices and rules from official sources such as Kyoto City and the temples' own websites, and list the sources on each page. Where no official source says something, we say that instead of guessing. The facts on this site were last checked on 8 November 2026.

Does the site earn money from links?

No. There are no ads and no affiliate links on this site. If that changes, we will say so on the page where it happens.

Found a mistake?

Please tell us. Corrections about hours, prices and rules are the most useful.