You come for the maples and spend most of the visit indoors. Eiheiji climbs the side of a wooded mountain in Fukui, and its seventy-odd halls are joined by roofed corridors and covered stairways, so the visit is a climb under a roof rather than a walk in the open. Rain does not matter here. The colour comes to the windows instead, arriving between one flight of steps and the next.

Peak colour falls in the first half of November. There is no designated viewpoint, no place where you are told to stand. The corridors decide for you, opening at intervals onto a slope of red and yellow and then closing again, so that looking becomes closer to turning pages than to taking in a view.

Something else is going on while you walk. Close to a hundred and fifty monks live here, as they have since Dogen founded the place in 1244, and November is when the winter training term opens and the bamboo screens go up against the coming snow. The maples are not an event. Nobody announces them. They change behind the ordinary business of a working monastery, which is why they read less like a display than like weather.

Lunch is not served inside. The shops along the approach below the gate do the feeding, mostly buckwheat noodles eaten within earshot of the stream. Go down in the late afternoon, when the light flattens and the crowds thin. The mountain will still be turning after you have finished eating, and that is what you take home.