Kanazawa o tansaku

Tuesday 5 July 2016

To start the day we dropped into a local kisseten for some breakfast. Coffee came with a sliver of thick toasted white bread and jam, butter or sweet red bean paste plus an egg. Not quite the more substantial breakfast we are accustomed to...

Just around the corner was the Omi-cho Market, which was just getting going for the day as we wandered through, trying not to stare at the wide and weird array of seafoods, fruits and vegetables, and dried goods that were being sold at the different market stalls - some items were familiar but many we had never seen before and could only guess what they were or how they would used or eaten. As it is summer here at the moment, there were a lot of seasonal fruits at the greengrocer stalls so we stopped for some watermelon and white cherries - delicious.

We dropped back to our little hotel rooms to load up the backpacks, before heading out to explore Kanazawa. The city sort of aligns with two parallel rivers, the Asanogawa and Sagawa, with the main train station at one end, but has a bit of a confused layout that takes a bit to come to terms with. Also as Kanazawa was spared from most of the air attacks in WWII there are number of districts contaiining many historic houses and other buildings. 

We headed across the Asanogawa River to one of these districts: Higashi Chaya. This area had a number is streets and alleys lined with older style houses with beautiful lattices and hidden gardens, as well as shops, teahouses and shrines. We entered the district through a side-street and came across an Edo period (1603-1868) house set up as a museum, with some enthusiastic elderly volunteers who insisted on showing us around. At the end of this street, we criss-crossed through some alleyways to the main street,  Hikarigura, lined with teahouses with second story verandas, a couple of gesiha houses and shops selling local crafts. 

It was a warm morning so, still hungry from our meagre breakfast, we took a morning tea break in one of the teahouses. While it wasn't the full traditional tea ceremony, Kerryn and I enjoyed the local speciality kaga bocha (roasted green tea) with kanokogashi (a traditional Japanese sweet made from red beans). Em had a coffee jelly sundae while the boys had iced chocolates and toasted sandwiches. Very refreshing!

Then Kerryn set about exploring the craft shops, while Joel, with a sighs of resignation, tried to find free wifi! The Higashi Chaya district is particularly famous for gold leaf and there was a huge array of items adorned in this precious metal film. We were given a demonstration of the process for making gold leaf. Formerly a manual procedure of successively pounding the gold film between special Japanese papers, it is now machine assisted but still quite labour intensive as the gold is beaten to a thickness of 0.2micron - thin enough to be translucent when held up to the light - then hand trimmed into standard sized squares and stored, ready for use, stacked between special papers. 

After an hour or so of browsing the craftshops, we had got to the end of Higashi Chaya and were all getting pretty "h-angry". Struggling to find anywhere to purchase lunch, we came across the "Indian Curry" restaurant. This tiny diner-style shop had an interesting, a very Japanese, interpretation on curry - fried chicken on a kind of curry gravy and rice with shredded lettuce, but it had us feeling full and satisfied in no time!

Refuelled and ready for more exploring and not put off by our experience in Kyoto, we decided to have another go at sightseeing by bicycle. Kanazawa's Machi-nori public bike rental system is well set up with docking stations across the city and provided you limit your bike riding to less that 30 minutes, per trip between docking stations, it only costs 200 yen for the day. You register with credit card and get a password printout that enables you to unlock the bike from a dock and off you go. The bikes were well maintained, but sized for smaller Japanese (not taller foreign tourists) so riding for much longer than 30 minutes was a challenge! We registered and pick up bikes from the docking station near Higashi Chaya. 

Our first ride took us to Kenrokuen Garden, adjacent the Kanazawa Castle. While there was a (small) admission fee, it was well worth it as the Garden is a cultural property and national site of special scenic beauty. It is a "strolling-style" landscaped garden typical of the Edo period. It combines the six attributes of a perfect landscape garden: spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, watercourses and panoramas. It is exactly what you would expect an typical Japanese garden to look like and quite beatiful. We enjoyed wandering along the shady pathways, as it was a hot afternoon, and taking in all the views and features of the garden, with a brief stop for vending machine ice creams.

Back on bikes, we crossed the Saigawa River to visit the Nishi Chaya District, famous for geisha, samurai and the Ninja Temple. The historic houses in this area were similar in style to Higashi Chaya and while we didn't see any geisha or samurai, we did find the Ninja (Myoryu-ji) Temple but, as it was late in the afternoon and you needed to book for a tour, we didn't get to go inside.

Heading back to the bike docking station near our hotel, we stopped to have a look at the Oyama Jinja Shrine, which had quite beautiful gardens with a reflective walkway across a large pond. There are quite a large number of temples and shrines in Kanazawa, and it seemed to me that it might give Kyoto a run for its money as the 'temple capital of Japan"....

We had ramen for dinner at a local kaitenzushi ("cheap-eats" diner) then just had to drop into a 7-11 convenience store for some ice cream treats for dessert to finish another busy day in Japan....