Kanazawa

I'm awful glad I made a stop in Kanazawa on the way to Tokyo from Osaka. After the jump, I'll tell you why, but first, here's another dumdum video with a song that was not stuck in my head during my visit, but somehow felt immediately perfect when I heard it as I was piecing the footage together. Music: who cares about it!

So, let's lead with the caveat: I didn't spend nearly enough time in Kanazawa. Probably 24 hours start-to-finish, the limited window ensured that my remembered/imagined Kanazawa will always be a bit drizzly, lush, and green. (Not unlike how my images of Copenhagen and parts of Scotland are: gosh, always sunny and in the low 70s, basically heaven on earth! These are realistic and normal assumptions to have.)

And I should correct a common framing of Kanazawa that I think is more publicity spin than a true reckoning of the place: plenty of guidebooks and promotional materials refer to it as "Little Kyoto," largely on the strength of Higashi Chaya district. This area is (true!) full of wooden houses, pedestrian lanes, and geisha, if you're one of the weird and vaguely unpleasant people who thinks Geisha Spotting is a legit travel goal. But more on that later.

The thing is: Higashi Chaya is indeed charming, and especially at night you have a sense of quiet there that's a bit transporting in ways that even Kyoto sometimes doesn't manage. There's a bit of magic in the realization that the restaurants and bars do have patrons gathered inside, especially on a rainy night, but the streets themselves are vacant. It's real good!

Also, let's stop messing around and start putting willow trees everywhere! Come on, people!! It's very lovely and relaxing plus you get to have Harry Nilsson's "Don't Leave Me Baby" stuck in your head for the rest of the day! Although you'll always have to look it up to remember that that's the name of the song, because "Willow Song" is a different and less addictive song! Anyway, let's all go take a nap.

Also: yeah, geisha are a thing here. I inadvertently confirmed this by enjoying some Japanese gin in a small 20-seat bar around the corner from my $25-a-night minshuku lodgings. It was just me, the bartender, a server, and a table of four ladies on a girl's night out. About halfway through my drink, two geisha walked in; initially I thought they might be women dressed up as geisha For Fun (you see this a lot in Kyoto, less so in Kanazawa) but based on the staff's reaction it was clear they were the real deal. A few minutes later, after they had settled in, two businessmen arrived to join them. And! I felt very awkward! Look: I think most people know by now that the geisha=prostitute assumption is very not true, but the whole culture of women trained specifically to entertain men is a little squicky to me. But maybe more to the point, it's extremely not my culture. I didn't come to this bar to geisha-hunt, and having encountered them it seems pretty gross that western tourists do that. I don't have a more profound thought than that, just: no thanks.

But I digress: like Kyoto's Gion district but more so, Higashi Chaya is only one corner of a much larger city. That doesn't mean it's not there, but it definitely oversimplifies Kanazawa to treat it as a less-touristed mini-Kyoto. Especially since a lot of what's here is remarkable in new and innovative ways! Look at the 21st Century Museum of Art, whose rotating and permanent exhibits push the envelope and contain some real treasures. (If nothing else, get a view of the Swimming Pool installation from the basement of the museum itself; I have a short list of exhibits and pieces here that I'm hoping make it to the U.S. so I can harangue my friends to go see them.) It's also home to the D.T. Suzuki museum, honoring the man who brought Zen Buddhism its global prominence; this space is simple and probably more rewarding to students of buddhism than a casual visitor, but it's got plenty of company in the cluster of museums that ring the city's central park.

"What if the Suzuki museum were kind of like an mid-century modern version of a temple" is what a lot of the spaces here felt like, and the answer is: it would be chill and good!

And that park... Kenroku-en has the oddly official stamp of being one of the three most beautiful gardens in Japan, and it massively lives up to the bureaucratic designation as such. Even in winter, it's lovely - and I was charged with the impulse to come back and visit it in spring, summer, and autumn just to see how it evolves with the seasons. (Did you know that the Japanese track numerous microseasons, and not just the main four? Now that you've read it, you can no longer credibly deny that you are aware!!!)

I didn't do a great job of capturing this place, but also it's one of those places (like fjords, oddly enough, or Skye) where the damp air and rich muddy colors are just tremendously hard to capture in any medium other than yanking somebody onto a boat and going there. So uhhhh go to Kanazawa you'll see that I'm right.

The best way to see Kenroku-en (I trust, as I took the advice and haven't tried it The Other Way) is to go when the city's residents do: before it opens. One entrance is open to the public from about 7 AM (6 during the summer) until it opens to tourists, bus tours, and hordes of visitors. It's not a formal distinction - anyone who wants to wake up early can go if they can find this entrance - but you really get swaths of the park to yourself, and can enjoy the quiet and peace that prevailed before it ended up on all these lists. This was almost the perfect way to say farewell to Kanazawa... except of course it wasn't, because I hadn't visited the fish market yet.

Unphotographed (again: I don't like taking photos of people while they're working!), this market is now likely one of the best ones to visit in Japan if you want a feel for a real market, now that Tokyo's Tsukiji has closed down and moved to an antiseptic, dull complex further out from the city. (I haven't been to Hakodate, but hear that their morning market is a strong contender as well.) It's all slabs of fresh fish, oysters, urchin, shrimp, and dozens of stands selling hot pot during the winter as well as numerous other treats I couldn't recognize.

Me, I made do with a simple sushi breakfast at a recommended spot in the market. And I'll go ahead and spoil the outcome of my one splurgey sushi lunch in Tokyo to say: this was the best sushi I've had in my life. (Affordable, too! Sushi's one of those things like lobster that I like plenty, but don't want to spend as much as you often need to. Here, it was achingly fresh and modestly priced, and I could have eaten there forever.) Get ye to it and chow ye down.

I'd like to sum up Kanazawa in some kind of "closing paragraph" mode, but ultimately, I only caught a snippet. That's true of everything here, obviously... even after spending a month apiece in Berlin and Florence, and two in Vienna, I feel like I barely have begun to get a handle on what those cities are, so all of these "I went to Kyoto for four days here's my big thoughts" posts are sort of vaguely fraudulent. But here even more so; I suspect that three or four days in Kanazawa, enjoyed at leisure, would be extremely delightful, and who knows: maybe I'll come back when the whole place is in bloom! You, nor no other creature on this earth, can stop me.

But for real, go to the lower-level part of the Swimming Pool at the 21st Century Art Museum when it is raining, and all things will be glorious and cool and swell.