To visit Kyoto is often to experience what Oscar Wilde thought of Wagner's music -- beautiful moments, but bad quarters of an hour. The time spent soaking up the splendors of its temples and gardens seems slight at the side of those long bus rides getting there across a cityscape that goes out of its way to be as dreary as possible. For a place that has managed to preserve its glorious past within an engaging present, you head for Nara.

Like its more famous neighbor to the north, Nara was once the capital of Japan, and during Nara's time as the imperial seat, from 710 to 794, that later upstart Kyoto was but a minor spot on the map. The Nara Period was an interesting one. It was the time when Japan was sending a series of diplomatic embassies to Tang China, and the country fell under the strong cultural sway of the empire to the west.

Japan's new capital was directly modeled, as Kyoto would be, on the grid pattern of the Tang capital of Chang'an (modern-day Xian). Along with the writing system, music and a taste for feng shui geomancy, one cultural import that Japan received (albeit at first indirectly) from China was Buddhism. Initially advanced by some factions mainly owing to its political usefulness rather than out of feelings of deep piety, Buddhism had by the Nara Period become a powerful force in the country. So it was that when the great temple of Todaiji was inaugurated in Nara in 752, the building wore all the aspect of a grand national cathedral. Constructing the temple, from 710 to 784, was no small undertaking.