Blog - Kanazawa day 1

Kanazawa day 1

Last week I took my summer holiday and we headed to Kanazawa, a town in Ishikawa prefecture near the west coast. We had good weather (just little bits of rain on the 1st day) and a great time eating sushi and "hanton rice", and doing some sight-seeing around town. I took about 150 photos of which I'll post the best along with daily summaries.

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On Monday September 22, we left Tokyo early in the morning and took the shinkansen to Echigo-Yuzawa (Niigata pref.) and then a normal train to Kanazawa. The whole took about 4 hours.

We arrived at Kanazawa station around 11:00 and we went to check-in to Miyako Hotel just across from the station. It can be seen through the large "Motenashi-mon" that's on the east exit. Kanazawa doesn't have train public transportation within the city, only buses, but then again a lot of it is walkable.

Our first destination was a nearby department store to have some sushi for lunch at Morimori-zushi, a spinning sushi restaurant. We enjoyed the recommended local shrimp and kajiki maguro (marlin?), and a lot more. Kanazawa is renowned for fresh fish, being that it's near the sea of Japan.

We then walked down towards the center of town, where are located Kanazawa Castle and Kenroku-en. It was raining just a little bit when we arrived at the castle but the sky cleared up quickly and we could enjoy some nice sight-seeing. Kanazawa Castle doesn't look like the typical Japanese castle, its main building has a long structure. It has been rebuilt in very recently in 2001 and is being used as a museum.

It was interesting that by the walls there are holes in the floor to throw stones to enemies who would try climbing, and also that the main room was made with a diamond shape (skewed) that made its construction very complex.

Then we went over to the adjacent Kenroku-en, a large maintained Japanese garden and took some time to look around it. It was very beautiful.

The last picture is of what's said to be the oldest fountain in Japan dating from 1861. It uses only potential energy from the water coming from an elevated point, no pump involved.

We were getting hungry again, and we wanted to go for some "hanton rice", a yōshoku meal very specific to the area. We looked for it a bit everywhere but were surprised to only find it in the places that we had looked up before going. The first of these was Lucky (1-26 Yokoyama-chō), but we weren't so when we first passed because it wasn't open yet. So we decided to go for some more walking and to come back later.

We walked along Asano-gawa in direction of Kazue-machi.

Kazue-machi is an old area of town that used to be known as a men's night spot. There's some wall next to a shrine hiding an entrance to the area, rumored to have made it easy to be making a quick wish at the shrine and just disappear the next moment..!

After having visited these streets, we found by chance the Kanazawa Phonograph Museum, and being a music fan I couldn't help entering. The museum contains over a hundred of very old but working record players, going as far back as the very first Edison models that used cylindrical records (I think I had heard of such before, but I had never seen one), and also a lot of very old Victor and Columbia players.

There are three daily demonstrations where records are played on a dozen of different players, and we were lucky in a way to catch the last song from the last demonstration that day (starting at 16:00), but I'd really have liked to hear all of them.

We looked through the museum, appreciating that great collection, and an old man who works there came to give us some explanations. We saw needles that consisted of rose thorns and bamboo, and an Edison player used diamond. He told us that on some of the players used in the demonstration, they change the needle after 2 plays to avoid damaging the very old records, all of which are 78 RPM. In Japan they call 78's "SP records" (vs LP).

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Then we continued walking around the area, across the river to Higashi-chaya-gai, another very old area of town. Of interest was a building that was entirely gold plated, in and out.

We then walked back along the river and went to Lucky again which was now open. We rewarded ourselves with "hanton rice", an omrice with ketchup rice and topped with fried white fish and tartar sauce. Simple and just great! I wondered why this meal doesn't make its way to Tokyo. :)

We caught a bus back to the hotel, and used complementary drink tickets at the top floor's bar. We enjoyed our free cocktails while getting some useful tips from the barman.

Larger sizes and more photos at Flickr

Posted on September 28, 2008 at 02:47 | Tweet |

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