Things to do
15-
21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
SANAA gave it a circular plan with no front and no back, enterable from any side, which is the argument the building was made to put. More than a million and a half came in its first year, and even in a year when attendance fell by nearly two thirds it still ranked tenth in the world. Its swimming pool is entered from underneath as well as looked into.
-
D. T. Suzuki Museum
Yoshio Taniguchi built this for a philosopher born in the city, and its centre is a room looking onto a shallow sheet of water, no gallery at all. The collection is small on purpose, since the subject is a way of thinking, which leaves very little to look at, and the visit is mostly sitting. It does not reward hurry, and it is a short climb from the contemporary art museum.
-
Higashi Chaya District
Licensed into existence in 1820, when the domain permitted two teahouse quarters at once and re-cut the crooked plots into a grid, which is why the street reads as designed. It measures about a hundred and thirty metres by a hundred and eighty, and two thirds of its buildings are still traditional. Almost all are private or working, so the interiors open to a visitor are few.
-
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Art
The Maeda family collection sits at the core of this one, brought back from the University of Tokyo and shown alongside the prefecture's most important designated assets. It opened in 1959 and was rehoused in 1983 when the holdings outgrew the first building. Only part is on show at a time, so the walls change between visits. It stands in the cluster of institutions inside Kenroku-en.
-
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts
Ishikawa's designated crafts are gathered into one room here, which is the practical argument for coming before shopping for any of them. Lacquer, dyed silk, gold leaf, pottery and inlay sit together with the tools that made them. It stands inside Kenroku-en itself, so the garden ticket and this one belong to the same walk.
-
Kanazawa Castle
A fortified temple held this ridge before any castle did, the stronghold of a peasant league that ran the province for most of a century. Sakuma Morimasa began converting it in 1580, and the Maeda ruled Kaga from it for fourteen generations. Restoration since has used traditional joinery, not concrete, which is rare in Japan. Kenroku-en next door was once its outer garden.
-
Kanazawa Noh Museum
Kaga Domain pushed Noh chanting down into the general population, and not only onto the samurai class, and the local saying is that chanting falls out of the sky here. This museum exists because of that, and not as a general collection. It shares a block with the contemporary art museum, so the two make one stop, and an hour covers it.
-
Kanazawa Yasue Gold Leaf Museum
A municipal museum given over to one material. Gold leaf is beaten down to a thickness measured in ten thousandths of a millimetre, between sheets of specially treated paper, and the trade is what the city is known for nationally. It stands in the Higashiyama quarter a few minutes from the teahouse street, so the leaf and the lacquer make a single walk.
-
Kazue-machi Chaya District
Third of the city's three teahouse quarters, and the one on the water. Stepped lanes drop to the Asano bank northwest of Higashi Chaya, across the Asanogawa bridge, so the two are walked as a single circuit. Narrower, residential and still working, it stays quieter than its neighbour and comes into its own at dusk when the lanterns go on.
-
Kenroku-en
Its name is a quotation from a Chinese text on the gardens of Luoyang, which held that six qualities never come together: space and seclusion, artifice and age, water and a long view. Maeda Tsunanori began it around a villa in 1676, fire took it, and the eleventh lord revived it in 1774. Rope rigging goes up against the snow load every winter.
-
Myōryū-ji
The shogunate banned buildings above three storeys, so this one reads as two from the street and holds four floors in seven layers inside, with twenty three rooms and twenty nine staircases between them. Hidden doors, pitfall traps and a glazed lookout over the Kaga plain are all in it, and no ninja ever were. Visits are by reservation, in a guided group.
-
Nagamachi Buke Yashiki
Middle and upper retainers of Kaga Domain lived here below the castle, and what survives is the earth walls and the gates, the houses behind them long gone. The lanes are narrow, unsigned and deliberately dog legged, so the thread through them is easy to lose. A few of the houses and a rest house are ticketed and keep their own closing days.
-
Ōmichō Market
Kanazawa's kitchen for roughly three centuries, and still known by its nickname, Omicho, and seldom by its name. Some hundred and seventy shops fill the narrow lanes: fishmongers first, then greengrocers, butchers, florists and counters serving what has just been cut. Mornings are the working market and afternoons thin out. Individual shops post their own closing days, so a given stall may be shut midweek.
-
Oyama Shrine
Its gate is the strangest building in Kanazawa: twenty five metres of Japanese, Chinese and European religious architecture stacked together in 1875, with Dutch stained glass in the top storey said to have served as a lighthouse. The shrine below honours Maeda Toshiie, was founded on the hill to the east and moved down into the city under Meiji. Best after dark, when the glass is lit from inside.
-
Seisonkaku
Built in 1863 by the thirteenth Kaga lord as a retirement house for his mother, which makes it a domestic building, never a seat of power, and the one place in the city where the Maeda household's interiors can actually be seen. Her personal effects are shown in it. It stands inside the Kenroku-en grounds and is ticketed apart from the garden.