Kyoto for The Family Explorers: a Friday-to-Monday weekend

Ride the escalators up the great staircase, which plays a light show on its steps after dark, to the rooftop garden for the first view over the roofs.

A hundred metres up a 1964 candle of a tower, with free telescopes and the five mountains named on the windows; children pay about half.

Eight regional ramen counters in a corridor on the tenth floor; the ticket machines have pictures, the bowls arrive in four minutes and nobody minds a mess.

Fifty-three real locomotives, a driving simulator, a working turntable and a steam train that does a ten-minute run; the roof terrace watches the shinkansen go by.

Across the park after the nap: the giant salamanders of the Kamo river, a dolphin show at set times and a penguin colony with a family tree on the wall.

Okonomiyaki cooked on the hotplate at your table, the children choosing the toppings and watching the bonito flakes wave; done by seven, in bed by eight.

Twenty-five minutes in an open-sided carriage along the Hozu gorge, the driver slowing at the best drops; book seats on the river side the day before.

A steady twenty-minute climb that six-year-olds manage, then macaques fed from inside a wire hut with the city spread below; keep food in bags and hands to yourselves.

Pork cutlets, the children's set with a smaller cutlet and a jelly, and the sesame to grind with a wooden pestle, which is the part they remember.

The nightingale floors squeak at every step, which children test on purpose; painted tigers in the rooms, carp in the moat and a flat gravel loop of the walls.

A whole wall of manga to read on the floor or the lawn, a kids' room for the small ones and a portrait artist who draws you as a character.

Conveyor-belt sushi where the plates roll past at child height, egg and cucumber for the cautious, and the bill counted by colour; out in forty minutes.