Time to get a move on, people. Time to knuckle down and turn this mutha out, in a literary sense. I'm splitting up the post on Kanazawa because I've been working on this post for months. Mostly this has been because a new member of the family has made spare time to write a precious commodity. The delay has afforded a bit more time for reading, and in particular a couple new books shedding some light on the subject of this post, but there's still a lot more to write about as well as a couple new projects directly related to the contents of this little blog. In short, I'm gonna just break what's left down into nice, bite sized pieces and mix in some of the new stuff as well and just post and post, so chronology may go a bit out the window. For now, however, the subject is Kanazawa...and mistakes.
There is nothing inherently wrong with mistakes. There's nothing inherently right about 'em either. Mistakes can be bad, its true; introducing Kudzu to the Southern United States was a mistake; same thing with leaded gas. But Teflon was the result of a mistake, and as you clean your disgusting frying pan with ease who could say that was a horrible mistake? I'm taking the roundabout way to saying going to Kanazawa was a mistake. A very surprising and wonderfully enjoyable mistake, but a mistake nonetheless. Basically, we never intended to actually
visit Kanazawa, we thought we were just going to spend the night there on the way to someplace else. As it happens, serendipity decreed otherwise and we got to see what was actually a pretty darned good town.
When planning our trip we were trying decide what to do after leaving Kyoto. Eventually we settled on a rambling, wandering route back to Tokyo to spend a bit of time before flying home. Holly wanted to see the rocky Sea of Japan coast along
HERE and I wanted to see some mountains and ride trains through them. With this as the marching orders the plan was to head northeast from the old capital, stay somewhere near the coast on the way to a turn south through the mountains en route to an eventual stay in the little tourist town of Tsumago for a couple nights. Holly's amazing hotel divination skills were put to work and Kanazawa bubbled to the surface. The place she picked reflected that we were expecting little more than to sleep in Kanazawa near the station; there would be no ryokan or fancy, cute, funky place. No, there would be the Dormy Inn Kanazawa, whose virtues were that it was cheap, seemed nice enough, and was walking distance from the train station. I'm not sure we ever even looked to see what there was to do in Kanazawa, just that it was at the right place on the map. Well, as the saying about about best laid plans goes: its that they are often stupid to begin with. Quite often, they have no visible connection to reality once you move from the "plan" to the "carry out the plan" stage. As it happens, our plan was stupid...or perhaps my plan was stupid, I'm not sure so I'm gonna try to claim it was a team effort. As it happens, there was no really easy way to get to the more scenic bits of coast without devoting a bit of time, and the route through the mountains from the north required more train changes than really made sense. Quite suddenly we found ourselves looking at the guidebooks to find out what there actually was to do in Kanazawa. The books didn't exactly sing the town's praises, making us a bit concerned we were about to spend some time in one of the urban sprawl non-towns we had passed many times on the train, which made it quite a shock to pull into a very bright, modern station and be greeted by one of the more interesting entrances we had so far seen.
As usual, we weren't even close to our check in time so we dumped our bags in a locker and headed to the tourist office where Holly was handed a pile of maps and info on the buses.
The first stop we got off was the "Geisha" district. Which was really just one of the old merchant districts in town. A good bit of this survives because, like Kyoto, it was mostly spared the destruction of Allied bombing in WW2 as well as being mostly off to the side of the direction of later development.
It was a really nice area and a fun stroll, but we were still a bit up in the air about this "what is Kanazawa" thing, so we hustled around the corner to the next thing on the list, the gold leaf connection. Clustered together were a few shops and museums devoted to the production of gold leaf, which I found intriguing. Was Kanazawa famous for its gold leaf? Heck if I knew. In my line of work we use the stuff often enough that I know a bit about it, and had a small professional interest in the stuff and why it was made in Kanazawa. The first stop was this place:
The museum was a pretty good time, but seemed to leave more questions than answers. It somewhat ambiguously alluded to a long connection between the town and gold, but without giving too many details of that history or even where the gold came from. It was very good at showing the Japanese take on gold beating, which was very similar to what I was used to seeing, just employing subtly different materials and techniques particular to what was available in Japan.
By the time we made it through the exhibits I had gotten it in my head that I wanted to bring back some genuine Japanese gold leaf, so from the museum it was a quick jaunt around the corner to one of the most bling-a-rific stores you will ever see.That's right, it was the Everything You Can Put Gold Leaf On Whether Or Not You Should Store, and it was fabulous. As we walked in the store we were immediately welcomed with gold leaf tea. The tea was delicious on a nice toasty day, and apparently the gold was good for your health,
but the sickly memories of misspent college weekends ruined by Goldschlager, and the confusion to this day of why that was a thing back then, left me suspicious.
The store had everything, from the beautiful to the tacky to the "whaaa?" At a basic level its not really hard to apply gold leaf to anything you would like, the question only remains why you would want a gilded Hello Kitty serving platter. Or golf balls. Or pencils. Or...wait, can you actually buy gold leaf? I looked around. I looked some more. I finally gave up and asked and was pointed to the little familiar sized packets sitting in a box next to the cash register almost as an afterthought, which I found positively charming.
Gold leaf in hand I counted myself as satisfied. But the question only seemed to loom larger: What was this strange town, with things to do and see, yet scattered about a buzzing, nose to the grindstone, workaday kinda place? Kanazawa, like many places in Japan, has a very distinct history and prehistory divided by an almost digital line. The contact zone between those two periods is often quite recent, and trying to sort out origins of things can be both interesting and infuriating. This can be seen in the name of the town itself: Kanazawa in the tourist press is usually translated to mean "marsh of gold" "stream of gold" "spring of gold" "well of gold" or something similar, with a fair amount of etymological debate about the exact translation. The issue is complicated because its possible the translation of the place name isn't related to the origin of the name in the slightest. Its all very mysterious. What is known is that the city sits on an ancient road that runs along the northern coast of Japan. In a previous post on Japan's railways it was briefly touched on that due mainly to its geology the island didn't have much in the way of overland transport until quite recently, and in ancient times this was even more pronounced. For the most part, if you traveled at all you either did so along the coast by small boat, or more likely by trails that ran along the foot of the mountains on the north and south coasts with other occasional roads running across the island between them where the terrain allowed. The road on which the future Kanazawa sits lies at the foot of the scenic Noto Peninsula (itself an ancient Ainu name, long predating the Japanese language), astride a pair of rivers, and in close proximity to decent harbors and tracks that lead inland into the mountains, which made it something of a transportation hub from dark antiquity. Those mountains, aside from creating the shelf that the overland trail runs along, are the ultimate origin of the flecks of gold that ran down in creek and river to eventually settle in the (maybe true, maybe not...who knows) tale of the hermit potato digger Fuji Goro that found the shiny placer deposits when washing his tubers. What he called the village in which he raised his spuds is unclear, but it sure as heck wasn't Kanazawa. There seem to have been several names used, particularly depending on which part you are talking about and the relative age of that part of town or even how you choose to read the characters in the name. Early names tend to be listed variously as Yamazaki, Oyama Gobo, Kanazawa Gobo, Ishiura among others. Its all very hazy but it seems there was a small trading village of a couple thousand people that suddenly became very important because right on the site of this golden swamp, overlooking its rivers and roads, was a nice strategic high spot, and in the turbulent warring states era following the aftermath of the Onin War strategic high spots were pretty hot real estate. The last time I had to deal with this time period I happily copped out and skipped right over it to get to my main point....and I'm gonna do the exact same thing again because...damn...that's a seriously large number of people I'd have to introduce to you in a pretty short time and...well, most of them pop into the tale for the briefest of moments before immediately getting killed anyway. This is all well and good anyhow because for the most part, the city of Kanazawa's story really begins with an immense bang in the middle of the 16th century.
But! here's a bit of advice. If you really want to impress your friends, go get yourself a copy of this little gem:
Then, when they start talking about politics, their daughter having measles, sports or some other mind numbing subject (as they do), whip out your copy of
Kanazawa: A Seventeenth Century Castle Town, fire up your finest pipe, let your glasses slip down your nose a bit and say: "piffle to all that rot". They will look at you and realize that you are clearly a person of unapproachable intellect and sophistication. I really liked this book. A lot. It took a couple tries to get a copy of this book, but it was worth it. Thanks to Kanazawa being spared a great many of the disasters that usually rolled through most Japanese towns (read: fire) there exists a wealth of documentation about the daily life of this castle town coming of age. As far as I can tell, McClain rifled through every single one of those documents and what he presents is one of those rare books that I so thoroughly cherish: a ridiculously micro-scale history of an overly esoteric subject. Here's the thing, most history, the kind that you would write a book about, is completely irrelevant to the lives of the people at the time that history was occurring. I know, that's a dumb thing to say, but life and history are two very different things, and life isn't just about the things that make a good book. Think about it, at any given point in time there are millions (more likely, billions) of regular folk in every trade, class, and color that are doing nothing that will ever need to have a mention in a history book. Millions of people right now are
not going to war,
not fighting for the oppressed,
not inventing the Houdry Process. Most of life and history is made up of the slow, uninteresting minutiae that is unremarkable day to day, place to place, era to era. Its the kind of history that people will one day learn about our society if the they have all our building permits and minutes of city council meetings. It takes someone who really, really cares about the lessons that can be learned about our world by combing through those files chronicling 5 centuries of urban development in Kanazawa, Japan to really illustrate that the world you live in is not just defined by battles and presidents, but by the work it takes to make the place you live the place it is. If there's one thing to take away from
Kanazawa the book about Kanazawa the town its that the process of making a place, virtually any place, is often so familiar, so thoroughly universal, so almost completely unremarkable...well, it almost needs to be remarked on, get it? Its the everyday sandwich of history, the aggregate in the concrete, something that's never going to be flashy but much more relevant to your existence than the fall of Constantinople, and yet its so basic you wonder why it
needs a tome written about it. I get my books delivered to my work so they won't get rained on or swiped while sitting in their little boxes or envelopes awaiting my return, which usually allows for a coworker to make some comment about my reading habits. When this one came in Jimmy, one of the aforementioned coworkers, saunters over and all I could do was look up from the precious treasure I had just pulled from its envelope, legitimately eager to read it, held it up so he could see the cover and ask him: "who would actually write this?" Jimmy could not help but agree, and sauntered off. It really is a good book.
After the gold leaf shop we continued our stroll, meandering our way back toward the station area to eventually check in at the hotel. We passed through the market, which was jolly and bustling and smelled fantastic, which reminded us it was lunch. Snacking on a couple croquettes, we were drawn into a restaurant near one of the entrances and I had what must have been the best chunk of tuna I had ever had in my life. To make sure it wasn't a fluke I ordered another and had another best chunk of tuna I'd had in my life. We really liked this market, it was much smaller than Kyoto's, but had a real charm to it and the variety of stalls and shops crammed in was great fun. When we first walked in something was being grilled up that smelled fantastic, and we hunted around with our noses trying to find it. In the end, we spent far longer in the place than we expected, just strolling around and taking in the sights, sounds, and smells, it was great fun. Continuing back to the station, I think we were already pretty happy we had ended up in Kanazawa, even if we were completely confused by it. We were even happy with the hotel, the Dormy Inn Kanazawa was not flashy, not fancy, just cheap and cheerful. It was very Kanazawa, with a strange name but intent on getting the job done with good spirits. We immediately fell asleep, and by the time we awoke it was dinner, or at least time to go roam around, see the town and start thinking where we wanted to eat. We took a bus over to the Korinbo area near the Sai River and ended up at an okonomiyaki joint that was really friendly and delicious. It was dark as we walked out and began poking around what had been one of the old merchant districts, now bedecked with the electric glow of modern Japan. Nowadays its kinda hard to say exactly what this part of town is, its got a downtown kinda feel, but it borders a neighborhood made up entirely of bars and clubs on one side and museums and city offices on the other. Though different from the other parts of town we'd seen so far, it had the same happy energy.
We were out in the weird late afternoon/early evening quiet time, but you could tell it probably picked up pretty quick
It was a good stroll, and as we sat in a Mister Donut and talked about the day, we decided we really liked Kanazawa. Far from feeling stranded, we were looking forward to the next morning and getting to see the castle and garden.
But I'm going to leave that for next time, because I gotta get some posts up or I'm gonna be on my next trip before getting this one squared away!
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