Snow in Toji Temple

Snow in Toji Temple presents Kyoto's great Shingon Buddhist temple — home to the city's most celebrated pagoda and the largest collection of Buddhist sculpture in Japan — in winter snowfall. Toji's five-story pagoda, at 54.8 meters the tallest wooden structure in Japan, dominated the southern approaches to the old capital and appeared in countless representations. In snow, the pagoda's multiple tiers each carried their individual cap of white, creating a vertical accumulation of horizontals that Asano rendered with careful attention to the specific quality of winter light on wooden architecture.