Kyoto

The capital of Kyoto Prefecture and one of the oldest municipalities in Japan, chosen in 794 by Emperor Kanmu as the new seat of the imperial court. The original city, Heian-kyō, was laid out by traditional Chinese feng shui on the model of Chang’an and Luoyang, and emperors ruled from here for the following eleven centuries, until 1869. Its 1.46 million people make it the ninth-most populous city in the country and hold more than half of the prefecture’s population; it anchors a Greater Kyoto of some 3.8 million and forms part of the wider Keihanshin area with Osaka and Kobe.