Vincent

Kyoto is easy to see and surprisingly hard to understand. You can walk through Fushimi Inari, Arashiyama, and Gion in a single day, come away with good photos, and still have no real idea what you were looking at. That gap is the part I care about. I'm Vincent. My father is American, from New York, and my mother is Japanese. I was born in Toyama and moved around Japan six times before I was fourteen, then moved to Wisconsin on my own for high school and lived in the US for a few years after that. I came back to Japan at the end of 2023 and have been guiding in Kyoto since March 2024. Growing up between the two cultures means I can explain Japan without romanticizing it and without assuming you already know the basics. I've had to explain both countries to people from the other one for most of my life, so I have a decent sense of what actually confuses visitors and what doesn't. Most of my tours cover the well-known areas: Fushimi Inari, Arashiyama, Gion. They're popular for good reasons, and they're much better with someone who can tell you what you're looking at and knows when to step off the main path. When there's time, I also enjoy taking people to Nijo Castle, the Imperial Palace, and the quieter Zen temples that most itineraries skip. The format is simple. I share what I know, you ask whatever you're curious about, and we go at the pace of the conversation rather than a schedule.