There is a standard recommendation, delivered sotto voce by Japan specialists to repeat visitors who say they have done Kyoto three times already: go to Kanazawa.
The reasoning is geographic and historical. Kanazawa sits on the Japan Sea coast of central Honshū, roughly two and a half hours from Kyoto by the Thunderbird and Hokuriku shinkansen. It was the seat of the Maeda clan from 1583 to 1868, a nearly three-hundred-year run during which the family became the wealthiest domain in Japan outside the Tokugawa themselves, and channelled that wealth into the patronage of craftsmen, tea masters, and garden designers rather than military ambition. The result was a provincial capital whose cultural accumulation rivalled Kyoto's across several specific disciplines: lacquer, silk, Noh theatre, tea ceremony, and the making of gold leaf.
The second reason concerns what the city was spared. Kanazawa was not bombed during the war. The wooden teahouse districts, the samurai residences, the canals that run beside the garden walls: all of it is as it was in 1940, and more or less as it was in 1890.
what remains
What remains
Three districts in particular reward a guest with time. Higashi Chaya, the eastern teahouse quarter, is the largest surviving ensemble of Edo-period wooden chaya architecture in Japan: two parallel streets of latticed facades, grey-tile roofs, and teahouses that still function as teahouses. Nagamachi, the former samurai residence district, retains its earthen walls and the narrow channels of the Ōno-Shō Yōsui, the irrigation channel that dates from the sixteenth century. Kazuemachi, the smallest of the three chaya districts, sits along the Asano River and is the quietest of the three at dusk.
The garden of Kenroku-en, at the edge of the old castle grounds, is the landmark. It is conventionally counted as one of the three great gardens of Japan, alongside Kairaku-en in Mito and Kōraku-en in Okayama. It is also, by a noticeable margin, the most carefully composed of the three: a deliberate exercise in demonstrating the six classical attributes that a Chinese garden theorist of the Song dynasty argued could not all be present in a single landscape. The garden's name translates as the garden combining six attributes.
Kanazawa rewards a guest who has already had the Kyoto conversation, and is ready for a quieter one.
the craft
The craft
Ishikawa prefecture, of which Kanazawa is the capital, is responsible for roughly ninety-nine per cent of the gold leaf produced in Japan. The process, which requires hammering a gold ingot to a thickness of approximately one ten-thousandth of a millimetre, is performed by a small number of workshops within the city, several of which admit serious visitors by arrangement. The leaf itself is applied to lacquerware, folding screens, tea utensils, and occasionally to ice cream, which is an indignity the city has learned to live with.
Kutani porcelain, produced in the villages south of Kanazawa since the seventeenth century, is the other regional craft of international standing. The colour palette, deep blues, greens, purples, yellows, and the style of decoration, which often tells a narrative across the surface of a single piece, mark it out at a glance from other Japanese porcelains.
when to go
When to be there
Mid-November makes the strongest case for visiting Kanazawa. The foliage in Kenroku-en peaks in the second or third week of the month, simultaneous with the installation of the yukitsuri ropes: the tall wooden poles from which radiating cords suspend the pine branches against the weight of the coming snow. The resulting tableau is one of the most considered landscapes in Japan, and the crowds are a fraction of those at the equivalent Kyoto temples in the same week.
In late November through December, the city begins to wear its hanya-gasa, the straw snow-hats, on its garden statuary, and by January the first proper snows are falling on Higashi Chaya. The snowbound chaya streets are among the most photographed winter scenes in Japan. The guest who is interested in a Japan that is not Kyoto, and is willing to spend two nights to find it, has few better options.
