100 free Kyoto trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Kyoto was Japan's capital for more than a thousand years and was spared the bombs of 1945 by a single American cabinet member. This quiz covers that arc: Emperor Kanmu's move from Nara in 794, the Chang'an grid, the Ōnin War, Hideyoshi's rebuilding, the last shogun's surrender at Nijō Castle, the 1869 move to Tokyo, the Lake Biwa Canal and the 1997 climate protocol. The temples and districts get their own questions: the gold leaf and 1950 arson at Kinkaku-ji, the 10,000 torii and fox messengers of Fushimi Inari, Kiyomizu's stage, Gion's geiko and its July festival, the nightingale floors, Ryōan-ji's fifteen stones, Arashiyama's bamboo and monkeys, Kyoto Tower and Hiroshi Hara's station. There is also Nintendo's origin in playing cards, kimono weaving, Kyoto University's Nobel laureates, the Daimonji fires, Kyoto Sanga and the machiya townhouses. Easy questions ask what covers the Golden Pavilion and which game company calls Kyoto home; hard ones want the Hamaguri rebellion's toll and the year the modern city was formed. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the city and its sites, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Try our Japan and Tokyo quizzes next.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Kyoto became the seat of Japan's imperial court in which year, chosen by Emperor Kanmu?
794
The new city was laid out on a Chinese-style grid, and emperors ruled from it for eleven centuries.
Q 02What was the original name of the city founded in 794, meaning 'capital of tranquility and peace'?
Heian-kyō
Late in the Heian period people simply called it Kyōto, 'capital city'; after the move to Tokyo it was briefly Saikyō, 'western capital'.
Q 03Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Kyoto partly to escape Buddhist clergy in which city?
Nara
His final choice fell on the village of Uda in Yamashiro Province.
Q 04The imperial court left Kyoto for Tokyo in which year, at the time of the Meiji Restoration?
1869
Kyoto responded with a canal and Japan's first commercial electric railway to shore up its economy.
Q 05Which decade-long conflict of 1467-77 left Kyoto in ruins, with trenches dug through the streets?
The Ōnin War
The city did not really recover until the mid-16th century and has never seen such destruction since.
Q 06Which warlord rebuilt Kyoto in the late 16th century, ringing it with earthwork walls called odoi?
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
He also gathered the city's temples into Teramachi Street, still a Buddhist temple quarter today.
Q 07Which US Secretary of War insisted that Kyoto be struck from the list of atomic bomb targets in 1945?
Henry L. Stimson
Nagasaki replaced it; as a result Kyoto kept an abundance of prewar buildings and was headquarters of the US Sixth Army in the occupation.
Q 08Kyoto's 20 km canal, completed in 1890, brought water and hydroelectric power from which body of water?
Lake Biwa
From 1895 the canal's electricity powered Japan's first commercial electric railway.
Q 09Kyoto is nicknamed the 'thousand-year capital' because it served as Japan's capital from 794 until when?
1868
The Tokugawa shoguns actually governed from Edo, but the emperor stayed in Kyoto until the Restoration.
Q 10Roughly how many temples and shrines does Kyoto contain?
2,000
Seventeen of the most important were inscribed together as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1994.
Q 11Kinkaku-ji is famous for its pavilion whose top two floors are coated in what?
Gold leaf
Officially named Rokuon-ji, 'Deer Garden Temple', it began as the villa of shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu in 1397.
Q 12The Golden Pavilion seen today dates from 1955 because the original was destroyed how in 1950?
Arson by a novice monk
Hayashi Shoken, aged 22, then tried to kill himself on the hill behind; Yukio Mishima fictionalised the crime in The Temple of the Golden Pavilion.
Q 13Fushimi Inari-taisha is the head shrine of Inari, the kami of what?
Rice and agriculture
Q 21The Gion Festival originated in 869 as a ritual to appease the gods during what?
A plague
Emperor Seiwa ordered prayers to the god of the Gion shrine, and the practice was repeated wherever outbreaks recurred.
Q 22The flatland castle in central Kyoto was ordered built in 1601 by which founder of a shogunate?
Tokugawa Ieyasu
All the feudal lords of western Japan had to contribute, and it was finished under his grandson Iemitsu in 1626.
Q 23The corridors of the Ninomaru Palace are famous for 'nightingale floors' that do what?
Chirp when walked on
Merchants also worship Inari as patron of business, which is why every torii gate at the shrine was donated by a company.
Q 14Roughly how many vermilion torii gates line the trails of Fushimi Inari-taisha?
10,000
About 800 stand in a row as the Senbon Torii tunnel; the shrine was founded in 711 by the Hata clan, immigrants from the Korean Peninsula.
Q 15Which animals, regarded as Inari's messengers, are found as statues throughout Fushimi Inari-taisha?
Foxes
The mountain trails climb 233 metres past many smaller shrines and take about two hours to walk.
Q 16The Japanese phrase 'to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu' means roughly what?
To take the plunge
Edo-era tradition held that anyone surviving the 13-metre jump from the temple's wooden stage would have a wish granted.
Q 17Since 1995, Kiyomizu-dera has hosted which annual ceremony every 12 December?
The Kanji of the Year
The temple's name means 'Pure Water Monastery', after the Otowa waterfall on its grounds, and it predates the founding of the capital.
Q 18Kyoto's geisha do not call themselves geisha; what local term do they use?
Geiko
The word means essentially 'a woman of art'; Gion houses two hanamachi, Gion Kobu and Gion Higashi, split since 1881.
Q 19The Gion district grew up as an entertainment quarter in front of which place of worship?
Yasaka Shrine
The name Gion is the Japanese rendering of the Buddhist term Jetavana; Ponto-chō is the city's other famous geisha quarter.
Q 20The Gion Matsuri's float processions are held on which two July dates?
17 and 24
It began in 869 as a purification rite; on the yoiyama evenings before each parade, old houses open their doors to show family heirlooms.
The palace was finished under the third shogun in 1626 using parts of Fushimi Castle.
Q 24At which Kyoto site did the last shogun announce the return of authority to the emperor in 1867?
Nijō-jō
The declaration ended some 265 years of Tokugawa rule and opened the way to the Meiji Restoration.
Q 25Ryōan-ji's celebrated dry rock garden contains how many stones?
15
They sit in five groups amid raked white gravel, and from the veranda at least one stone is always hidden from view.
Q 26What is the Japanese term for the 'dry landscape' style of Zen garden exemplified at Ryōan-ji?
Kare-sansui
Larger rocks are set amid pebbles raked into linear patterns to aid meditation; the temple's name means 'Dragon at Peace'.
Q 27The Arashiyama district on Kyoto's western edge is famous for a grove of what?
Bamboo
Its Moon Crossing Bridge, Togetsukyō, frames the cherry blossom and autumn colours, and 170-odd wild monkeys live at the Iwatayama park.
Q 28What does the name Arashiyama mean?
Storm Mountain
It refers to the mountain across the Ōi River; Tenryū-ji, head temple of a Rinzai Zen branch, stands in the district.
Q 29Which video game giant, founded in the 19th century as a card maker, is headquartered in Kyoto?
Nintendo
Craftsman Fusajiro Yamauchi started it; the company moved into toys in the 1960s and released Donkey Kong in 1981.
Q 30Founder Fusajiro Yamauchi originally made what product at the company that became a video game giant?
Hanafuda playing cards
Its first console, the Color TV-Game, came in 1977; Kyoto is also home to Kyocera, Omron and Nidec.