Kyoto Trivia
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96 free Kyoto trivia questions with answers — geography quiz, new questions added Oct 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 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Emperor Kanmu's capital of 794 was laid out on which street pattern?
A grid
A grid on the Chinese model still shapes central Kyoto, where Shijō, the 'fourth avenue' of the original plan, is a busy shopping street today.
Q 02What was Kyoto's original name when Emperor Kanmu founded it?
Heian-kyō
Heian-kyō gave its name to the Heian period, the four centuries of court culture that followed; only late in that era did people begin calling the city simply Kyōto, 'capital city'.
Q 03Emperor Kanmu moved the capital to Kyoto partly to escape Buddhist clergy in which city?
Nara
The powerful Buddhist temples of Nara had meddled in court politics, so Kanmu left in 784 for Nagaoka-kyō and a decade later settled at the village of Uda in Yamashiro Province.
Q 04Tokyo, which replaced Kyoto as Japan's imperial capital, has a name that means what?
Eastern capital
Eastern capital is what Tokyo means: Edo was given the name in 1868 when it took over as the emperor's seat, and Kyoto was for a time called Saikyō, 'western capital'.
Q 05Which decade-long conflict of 1467-77 left Kyoto in ruins, with trenches dug through the streets?
The Ōnin War
The Ōnin War of 1467-77, a succession feud among the Ashikaga shogunate's great houses, turned Kyoto into a battlefield; much of the city burned and took decades to recover.
Q 06Which warlord rebuilt Kyoto in the late 16th century, ringing it with earthwork walls called odoi?
Toyotomi Hideyoshi
Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who completed Japan's unification in 1590, ringed Kyoto with the Odoi earthworks the following year and gathered the city's temples into one quarter along Teramachi Street.
Q 07Which US Secretary of War insisted that Kyoto be struck from the list of atomic bomb targets in 1945?
Henry L. Stimson
Henry L. Stimson, who had visited Kyoto and admired it, overruled the Target Committee; Nagasaki took the city's place on the list, sparing its prewar buildings.
Q 08Kyoto's great Meiji-era canal, completed in 1890, brought water and hydroelectric power from which body of water?
Lake Biwa
Lake Biwa, Japan's largest lake, fed the canal dug from 1885 to 1890; its Keage plant, the country's first commercial hydroelectric station, lit Kyoto's streets and powered its workshops.
Q 09Which tea master, perfecter of wabi-cha, was ordered to commit seppuku in Kyoto in 1591?
Sen no Rikyū
Sen no Rikyū served Japan's ruler as tea master until he was ordered to die in 1591, for reasons never made clear; his descendants founded the three Sen schools that still teach his way of tea in Kyoto.
Q 10Roughly how many temples and shrines stand in Kyoto?
2,000
About 2,000 temples and shrines crowd the city, and that cultural weight was the reason given when Kyoto was taken off the list of atomic bomb targets in 1945.
Q 11Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe are the three big cities of which region of Japan?
Kansai
Kansai means 'west of the barrier', a name coined as the counterpart of Kantō in the east; the barrier was later taken to be the checkpoint on the pass just east of Kyoto.
Q 12The Golden Pavilion seen today dates from 1955 because the original was destroyed how in 1950?
Arson by a novice monk
Arson by a novice monk destroyed the pavilion on 2 July 1950; the 22-year-old then tried to kill himself on the hill behind, and Yukio Mishima turned the crime into his 1956 novel 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 flatland castle in central Kyoto was ordered built in 1601 by which founder of a shogunate?
Tokugawa Ieyasu
Tokugawa Ieyasu ordered the castle in 1601 as his Kyoto residence, levying the daimyō of western Japan for the work; his grandson Iemitsu completed it in 1626.
Q 22The corridor floors of Kyoto's Ninomaru Palace are famous for doing what?
Chirp when walked on
Chirp when walked on is what the uguisubari, or 'nightingale floors', do: metal clamps under the boards shift and rub as the wood flexes, a sound popularly said to warn of intruders, though it may never have been intended.
Q 23At which Kyoto site did the last shogun announce the return of authority to the emperor in 1867?
Rice and agriculture were Inari's first concern; once money replaced rice as the measure of wealth, merchants adopted the deity as a patron of trade, and the shrine, older than Kyoto itself, heads thousands like it.
Q 14Who pays for the torii gates lining Fushimi Inari-taisha's trails?
Donors
Donors give each gate as an offering, to ask for a prayer to be answered or to give thanks for one that was, a custom widespread since the Edo period.
Q 15Which animals, regarded as Inari's messengers, are found as statues throughout Fushimi Inari-taisha?
Foxes
Foxes are honoured as Inari's messengers; worshippers offer them fried tofu, said to be a fox's favourite food, which is why tofu-pouch sushi is called inari-zushi.
Q 16The Japanese phrase 'to jump off the stage at Kiyomizu' means roughly what?
To take the plunge
To take the plunge: the saying recalls a real practice, for temple records list more than 230 leaps from the 13-metre stage between 1694 and 1864, and about 85% of the jumpers lived.
Q 17Since 1995, Kiyomizu-dera has hosted which annual ceremony every 12 December?
The Kanji of the Year
The Kanji of the Year, chosen by public vote and organised by the Japan Kanji Aptitude Testing Foundation, is brushed by Kiyomizu-dera's head priest on 12 December, Kanji Day.
Q 18What do the geisha of Kyoto call themselves in the local dialect?
Geiko
Geiko is the Kyoto word for a fully fledged geisha; an apprentice is a maiko, who graduates at about 20 in a ceremony called erikae, 'turning of the collar', trading her red collar for a plain white one.
Q 19The Gion district grew up as an entertainment quarter in front of which place of worship?
Yasaka Shrine
Yasaka Shrine was long known as Gion Shrine, and the town that grew up before its gate became the Gion quarter; the name Gion renders the Buddhist holy site Jetavana.
Q 20The Gion Festival originated in 869 as a ritual to appease the gods during what?
A plague
In 869 a plague swept the capital; 66 halberds, one per province, were raised at the Shinsen-en garden in a goryō-e rite to appease the spirits, and the festival grew from its repetitions.
Nijō-jō
Nijō-jō's Ninomaru Palace is where the fifteenth and last shogun gathered his senior retainers in 1867 to hand power back to the emperor, ending more than 260 years of rule by his family.
Q 24What is the Japanese term for the 'dry landscape' style of Zen garden exemplified at Ryōan-ji?
Kare-sansui
Kare-sansui gardens use rocks and raked gravel to stand for islands and water; they are made to be contemplated from a seat on the veranda as an aid to meditation, and are not for strolling.
Q 25The Arashiyama district on Kyoto's western edge is famous for a grove of what?
Bamboo
Bamboo towers over the paths of the Sagano grove, and the rustle of its stalks in the wind is prized enough that Japan's Environment Ministry lists it among the country's 100 soundscapes.
Q 26What does the name Arashiyama mean?
Storm Mountain
Storm Mountain is the literal reading, arashi meaning storm and yama mountain; strictly the name belongs to the wooded hills across the river, and the sightseeing district on the near bank borrowed it.
Q 27Which video game giant, founded in the 19th century, is headquartered in Kyoto?
Nintendo
Nintendo began in 1889 as Fusajiro Yamauchi's Kyoto workshop turning out hanafuda playing cards by hand, and it was another 88 years before its first home console, the Color TV-Game of 1977.
Q 28Which 1950 Akira Kurosawa film is named after the ruined southern gate of old Kyoto?
Rashomon
Rashomon opens with three men sheltering from a downpour under the crumbling gate, by then a notorious haunt of thieves; its Golden Lion at Venice in 1951 opened Western eyes to Japanese cinema.
Q 29The Kyoto Protocol, adopted in the city on 11 December 1997, committed countries to reducing what?
Greenhouse gas emissions
Greenhouse gas emissions from industrialised nations were to fall about 5% below 1990 levels over 2008-12; developing countries, China among them, were not required to cut theirs.
Q 30Kyoto Tower opened in December 1964, the year Japan first hosted which global event?
The Summer Olympics
The Summer Olympics came to Tokyo in 1964; the 131-metre tower, Kyoto's tallest structure, had been planned to be ready for them but did not open until 28 December.