varjohaltia | Japan, April 14th and 15th: Kanazawa and Kobe

Two other locations that had been suggested to me were Kanazawa and Kobe. On the 14th I took a JR train north to Kanazawa. It's a medium-sized town, and if you manage to get ground transportation or spend more time there, the nearby shores are rumored to be gorgeous and worth a visit. I only had the day and settled for a bus pass from the tourist info station and riding the loop bus that goes around the town.

One of Kanazawa's claims to fame is that it produces virtually all of the gold leaf used in Japan, and most of this is still manufactured by hand, by pounding gold sheets between paper. The paper is then sold off as blotting paper, apparently all the rage in beauty products. The majority of Kanazawan gold leaf comes from one company, Hakuza, and they have a show room / store in town. It's bit off the beaten path, but the loop bus runs nearby so it's a fairly easy visit. I went there during the week, and the staff was effusively happy to see a foreign tourist. Samples of candies with gold, free tea with gold, a tour of the gold-leaf room with gold-leaf tea ceremony gear...

Aside from that, while it's not huge, the store is great for souvenirs; a lot of the flatware, glassware and decorative items were gorgeous and not as over-the-top golden as the room pictured above. Of course you can also get candy with gold, cakes with gold, gold powder to put in foods, gold-plated golf balls, gold leaf in a jar and so forth.

There was also a brief demonstration on how one works with gold leaf, which is immensely thin by the time it's done. They put a piece of the leaf shown above on my palm, and I had to barely touch it before it disintegrated into my skin and vanished.

Kanazawa has a couple of small neighborhoods that have been preserved well, and have traditional restaurants and bars in a setting similar to historic Kyoto. One was by the river, and of course there were cherry blossoms.

Like any self-respecting city, Kanazawa has a castle. Like in many Japanese cities, the castle is a reconstruction. This one, however, was rebuilt in 2001 and using traditional methods. I had to admit that I'm at awe that a municipality would spend tens of not hundreds of millions to rebuild a castle, but I can certainly see worse use of tax money, and it must have kept many dying construction trades alive. It doesn't make it any less weird that the interior of the castle looks modern, and follows current building codes.

Some of the displays of the construction were translated, but unfortunately not all. The structure of the walls and roof was interesting, but I was completely dumbfounded by the woodworking. Parts of the castle are diamond shaped, with 100 degree and 80 degree angles; these have been reflected in the shapes of internal pillars and all structural elements. The entire thing fits together like a giant 3D jigsaw puzzle, from the humongous structural beams to the smallest detail, everything held together with clever joints rather than nails or bolts. The jointed structure together with its foundation is inherently earthquake-resistant — the construction practices from the Japanese middle ages already were well along with earthquake mitigation, to the extent where modern technology could add relatively little in this structure. Living archaeology at its best.

The castle grounds are pretty nice, and include some actually original buildings, but they're perhaps more notable because of the adjoining Kenroku-en park.

Kanazawa is called the "gateway to the Japanese Alps" and the moniker is accurate. Many vistas in Kanazawa included spectacular views of snow-topped mountains in the distance.

On the way back from Kanazawa, I picked a random seat on the train next an old woman. Turns out, she was likely the only person in the entire car that spoke perfectly passable English, and had spent her life globetrotting something serious. She proceeded to hand draw me several maps of all the places in Kansai and afar I had to go see. This mirrors my previous experience, where it's completely impossible to predict who does and doesn't speak English in Japan.

The next day I headed to Kobe, very easily reached from Osaka via various railway lines — and since Osaka is easily reached from Kyoto, this was very convenient. Unfortunately the day was rainy, to the extent where taking the camera out would've been problematic, so I didn't take too many photos. I did visit Nankinmachi or Chinatown, one of only three officially so designated in Japan.

As befits a Chinatown, the blocks it covers are positively delicious.

I then went to see the waterfront, Kobe Tower and Kobe Maritime Museum as well as the Meriken Pier, a small part of waterfront as it was after the devastating Hanshin-Awaji earthquake of 1995. I have to admit that seeing the destruction, and wandering through the displays and reading just how utterly the city was devastated I could not help but to be reminded of the calamity that was unwinding itself north in the Tohoku region at that very time.

The maritime museum was a bit lacking, mostly consisting of a ton of maritime memorabilia, haphazardly labeled in various languages. There were a few simulators, dioramas and such, almost exclusively in Japanese, as well as a Kawazaki company museum. The physicist in me, however, got a major kick out of seeing an honest to goodness Magnetohydrodynamic ship and drive.

I was also pretty impressed by the Hankyu railway which I took back out of Kobe. The various rail companies in the Kyoto / Osaka area are very punctual anyways, but Hankyu was the first one I saw following the Germanic perfection of moving the trains to an accuracy of seconds.

Gallery and slideshow, as usual, are available.