Five Days in Kanazawa: A Travel Journal from Japan's Craft Capital — discover Kanazawa
Day 1: Arrival and Gold
The Hokuriku Shinkansen from Tokyo took two and a half hours. The last thirty minutes, after the train dropped down from the mountain tunnels, gave me my first look at the Sea of Japan coast — grey water, grey sky, green rice paddies. Kanazawa Station's huge wooden gate (, shaped like a traditional drum) was the first sign that this city takes design seriously.
tsuzumi-mon
I checked into a small hotel near the station (JPY 9,500/night — comfortable, not fancy) and walked fifteen minutes to Higashi Chaya, the old geisha district. It was 4 PM and the crowds were thinning. The wooden teahouses with their dark lattice windows lined a stone-paved street that felt preserved rather than reconstructed. There's a difference. Reconstructed feels like a set. Preserved feels like time forgot to touch it.
I ended the day at Hakuichi, eating gold leaf ice cream. JPY 891 for a vanilla cone with an entire sheet of 24-karat gold draped over it. The gold tastes like nothing — it's biologically inert, as the shop's English sign helpfully explained. But biting into it felt transgressive in a satisfying way.
Spent today: JPY 12,200 (~$82) — hotel, train snacks, ice cream, dinner at a ramen shop near the station (JPY 950 for rich miso ramen that was genuinely perfect).
Day 2: The Garden and the Pool
Kenroku-en at 7 AM. JPY 320 entry. Almost nobody else there.
I don't usually care about gardens. I know that makes me sound uncultured, but manicured hedges generally leave me cold. Kenroku-en is different. It's not manicured in the French sense — it's composed. Every view through the trees is deliberate. Every bend in the path reveals a new perspective on the same pond, the same waterfall, the same teahouse. I kept turning corners and saying "oh" quietly to myself.
I spent two hours. I'd planned forty-five minutes.
The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art is a five-minute walk from Kenroku-en, and the contrast is jarring in the best way. You go from a 300-year-old garden to a circular glass building by SANAA that looks like it landed from the future.
The Swimming Pool installation by Leandro Erlich was the main draw. Standing beneath the glass panel, looking up through the thin layer of water at the sky and the faces peering down — it messes with your sense of reality in a way that's genuinely playful. I watched a girl wave at her friend from below, both of them laughing, and thought: this is what museums should feel like.
The exhibition (JPY 1,200 that day — it varies) had a show by a Japanese artist working with fermented indigo dye. The smell. The deep blues. The patience of waiting months for a chemical reaction to produce a color. Kanazawa gets into your head about process.
Afternoon: Nagamachi Samurai District. Earthen walls, narrow canals, quiet lanes. The Nomura-ke samurai house (JPY 550) has a garden the size of a hotel bathroom that somehow feels infinite. I sat on the tatami edge and stared at it for twenty minutes.
Spent today: JPY 7,070 (~$47) — garden, museum, samurai house, lunch kaisendon at Omi-cho Market (JPY 2,200 for a bowl piled with eight kinds of fish), coffee.
Day 3: The Market, the Ninja Temple, and Sake
Omi-cho Market opens at 9 AM and I was there at 9:01. This market has been operating since 1721 — three hundred years of Sea of Japan seafood, crab, uni, pickles, and things I couldn't identify.
The crab legs were terrifying in their size. Fat, red, covered in spiny protrusions. A vendor cracked one open and handed me a taste. The meat was sweet and dense. I bought a crab leg to eat on the spot (JPY 1,500). It was 9:15 in the morning. I had no regrets.
At 11 AM, I had my reserved tour of Myoryu-ji, the Ninja Temple. I'd called three days earlier (076-241-0888) and gotten a slot. The tour was in Japanese, but they gave me an English pamphlet, and honestly, the visual experience needed no translation.
The temple looks modest from outside. One story, simple facade. Inside, it has four floors, twenty-three rooms, and twenty-nine staircases — many of them hidden. The guide opened a panel that looked like a wall section, revealing a staircase behind it. She slid a section of floor open to show a trap door dropping to a hidden room. She demonstrated a well with a rope ladder descending to an escape tunnel.
This was built in 1643 to protect the Maeda clan from the Tokugawa shogunate. It's the most fascinating building I've been inside in Japan. JPY 1,000 and worth ten times that.
Afternoon: sake brewery circuit in the old town. Kanazawa has seven breweries, identifiable by the cedar balls (sugidama) hanging above their doors. Funasaka and Harada both offered free tastings of five to ten varieties. I tried a cloudy unfiltered nigori sake that tasted like rice milk with a kick. And a aged daiginjo that was smooth and floral.
I bought two bottles (JPY 3,200 total) and carried them carefully back to my hotel.
Day 4: For the perfect extension, head to Takayama and nearby Shirakawa-go Day Trip
The Nohi Bus to Shirakawa-go left Kanazawa Station at 8:40 AM. JPY 2,600 one way, fifty minutes. I'd booked online at nouhibus.co.jp three weeks ahead — the bus fills up, especially on weekends.
Shirakawa-go is a UNESCO village of steep thatched-roof farmhouses (gassho-zukuri) in a mountain valley. The roofs are insanely steep — 60-degree angles — designed to shed the 2+ metres of snow that falls here in winter. From the Shiroyama viewpoint, the village looks like a painting that someone forgot to update since the 18th century.
I visited Wada House (JPY 300), one of the largest farmhouses, to see the interior. Three floors, with the upper floors used for silkworm cultivation (the heat from the sunken hearth below rises to keep them warm). The wooden beams were held together without nails — all rope and joinery.
Lunch was a Hida beef croquette from a street stall (JPY 400) and a bowl of soba (JPY 900) at a small restaurant. Ate both sitting on a bench overlooking the river.
I took the 3:30 PM bus back. The afternoon light through the valley was doing things that felt illegal.
Spent today: JPY 9,100 (~$61) — bus round trip, Wada House, lunch, a handmade sarubobo charm doll for a friend back home (JPY 800).
Day 5: Last Morning, Last Market Bowl
I went back to Omi-cho Market. I couldn't not. This time I had a premium kaisendon with uni, ikura, and fatty tuna for JPY 2,800. It was obscene. I ate it at a counter with six other people, all of us silent with concentration.
Then I did the gold leaf workshop at Sakuda. For JPY 700, I applied gold leaf to a pair of chopsticks. The leaf is impossibly thin — it tears if you look at it wrong. The instructor used tweezers and a brush with movements so controlled they looked automated. My chopsticks came out slightly uneven. Hers would have been in a museum.
I walked through Higashi Chaya one last time at noon. The light was different from my first visit — warmer, more direct. A woman in a kimono walked ahead of me on the stone path, wooden geta clacking. A shopkeeper swept his doorstep. Two schoolgirls on bicycles rang their bells.
The Hokuriku Shinkansen back to Tokyo departed at 2:30 PM. I watched the Sea of Japan disappear behind the mountains and thought about coming back in winter, when Kenroku-en is covered in snow and the yukitsuri ropes turn the trees into geometric sculptures.
Total trip cost (5 days/4 nights): JPY 81,770 (~$545). That includes the Tokyo round-trip shinkansen, four nights accommodation, all meals, all activities, and a day trip to Shirakawa-go. Kanazawa is See our Kanazawa art lover's guide for cultural highlights.
For another shrine-rich Japanese destination, consider Nikko I'm already planning the winter trip. Like Kyoto's bamboo groves, Kenroku-en transforms with each season. Hot sake in a brewery. A ryokan with onsen. This city is the kind of place that reveals more every time you return.
