This was my final WHS of 4 covered on a week-long trip to Japan (February 2016). We took a JR Yamatoji Rapid Service from Osaka to Horyuji station and walked the twenty or so minutes to the temple site, passing a mochi-pounding festival in the local town.

Horyu-ji was calm and tranquil, with an impressively old set of wooden buildings. The Buddhist statues inspire a certain reverence even in those (such as me) who know little of their symbolic meaning.

It was raining, but we carried on regardless to walk the 2 kilometres to the nearby Hokki-ji temple. We passed through empty streets and across damp farmland, taking in cloud-obscured views of the low mountains that surround the plateau on which the temples are sited. I did consider attempting to catch a bus, but one look at the Japanese timetable told me that it was not an avenue worth pursuing!

Hokki-ji is much smaller than Horyu-ji, and for a while we were the only visitors there. I paid the monks a nominal few hundred yen to enter and wandered around looking at the three-story pagoda and associated buildings.

Having finished with our temple-spotting we walked another 2 kilometres to the station at Yamato-Koizumi to catch a train back to Osaka.