We met our guide a few minutes after nine this morning. She was a soft-spoken women probably a few years younger than us. Her name was Amori, I believe, but she preferred to be called Mori. We never did discover much about her background, but she was one of the most well-educated guides I have ever had. Before we started on our tour, we stopped by Starbucks because John really needed a cup of coffee. While we were there, Mori gave us a little background about Kanazawa. While there have been people living here for many centuries, the city first began to take shape in the Muromachi period of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The power of the government in Kyoto was quite weak at this time, and a peasant rebellion in this area resulted in the formation of a Buddhist state historians call the “Peasants’ Kingdom.” The peasants had difficulty establishing a strong central government, and the Oda Nobunaga, a powerful daimyo, defeated the peasant forced. He gave the Kanazawa area to one of his generals, Sakuma Morimasa, But after the assassination of Oda, Sakuma was defeated by forces loyal to Maeda Toshiie. in 1600, Maeda sided with Tokugawa Ieyasu. In gratitude, Tokugawa significantly expanded the lands of Maeda and during the many years of the Tokugawa Shogunate, the Kaga Domain was the largest in the country and the Maeda became one of the richest and most important families in Japan.
Because the Maeda were so rich and powerful, Kanazawa became a kind of little Kyoto. The enormous Kanazawa Castle, the symbol of Maeda power, dominated the center of the town. Around it were built not only elaborate defense but also extensive gardens and dozens of temples. This central area was surrounded by areas set aside for samurai, for merchants, and finally for geisha. The closer to the castle your home was indicated how important you were, how close you were socially to the center of regional power. One of the samurai districts is still largely intact, and our tour started there. Mori pointed out the original walls of a samurai home. These are made of a kind of adobe, and in the winter straw is placed over them to help keep them from weather damage. If you look closely, you can see irregular lines created by the straw.
That last picture, of course, is a picture of a picture as the winter mats were taken down some weeks ago. The streets, however, all always clear of snow thanks to an ingenious system that sprinkles them with warm spring water when it snows. The samurai neighborhood is now possibly the most exclusive place to live in Kanazawa. Homes are beautiful
and beautifully landscaped.
Mori snapped a picture of the two of us. We have noticed that the guides here like to take pictures of us. We try to explain that we know what we look like and could be happier about it, but they never take no for an answer.
One of these homes, called the Nomura-ke or "Nomura’s house," is open to the public. It is unfortunately a little too popular, and the place was so crowded with tour groups, mostly European, that we could barely move. The Normura family were not of the highest samurai rank, but they still had quite a comfortable life. The house fairly large, but it is only a part of the original compound. Kitchen, bedrooms, servant quarters, and other private areas of the house are now gone.
As I watched and listened to the other groups I really appreciated Mori. She had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the home and the period. She carefully explained the layout of rooms and Japanese homes and the function of the alcoves. Suddenly our room in Matsumoto made sense to me! The alcove is the central focus of the room. It is the only part of the room that is decorated in a western sense. There is always a scroll with a poem or saying written on it appropriate to the season and the occasion. There is also a floral arrangement of some kind. Coming into the room, guests are expected to sit quietly in front of the alcove, ponder the epigram or poem, and admire the flowers. After that, if this were a social occasion, the owner would sit on the floor with his back to the alcove and the guests would continue to face it.
Japanese homes are generally arranged around gardens. There is a larger garden between the house and the walls surrounding the home and smaller gardens among the different sections of the home. The smaller gardens allowed light and air to enter the home. The larger garden at Nomura-ke are some of the most famous in Japan. They are not large, but exquisitely designed.
The place was so crowded that it was hard to get a good picture. We just tried to flow through the crowds like these koi through the pond and see as much as we could, cursing Dutch and Hungarian tour groups under our breath.
Mori took time to explain the different parts of the family shrine.
She also took us up into a small second-floor room that looked utterly nondescript. I would walked briefly through the low doorway and left after a few seconds without her guidance. This plain little room, she explained, was the setting for the tea ceremony. While I tend to think of the tea ceremony as being a divertissement for women, it was in the sixteenth and seventeenth century a very serious affair for powerful men. The rituals of the tea ceremony were developed by Buddhists, particularly of the Zen school, to provide a framework for negotiations among powerful feudal lords and their samurai. Everything about the tea ceremony was designed to calm and focus these often volatile men and to allow them to calmly begin processes of compromise. Drinking tea made total sense now: these were not men who should be downing large quantities of sake!
One feature of the tea room was striking, the ceiling.
Mori told us that this is made of semi-fossilized cypress wood. One way to spot the function and importance of a room in a traditional Japanese home is to look at its ceiling. The extremely valuable wood here would have made the significance of this room obvious to anyone in the Edo period.
While most of the visitors in this house were foreigners, there were a few Japanese here. We have noticed that some young Japanese people, both female and male, seem to like to dress in traditional costume and have their pictures taken, often selfies, in historic sites. These two girls were doing that
but they were also quite happy to let foreigners snap pictures of them, too.
We took a taxi from here to our next stop, the Kanazawa Gardens. These are considered one of the most perfect Japanese gardens in the world, and both John and I would have to agree with that assessment! They are also enormous and stunningly located on a hilltop, adjacent to the castle, overlooking the city and the entire valley. The gardens were laid out by the Maeda family for their enjoyment and that of their guests. Mori explained to us that Japanese gardens aim to achieve certain opposites at the same time. They are utterly artificial, but are designed to look natural. They should provide a sense of spaciousness while still providing places for privacy and seclusion. Water needs to be constantly flowing through the garden, but it should often appear to be still as well.
The center of the garden is dominated by a large lake. The lantern here illustrates one of the aspects of the Japanese aesthetic: it is not perfectly symmetrical. One leg is intentionally shorter than the other because the irregularity was seen a making it more beautiful.
The lantern is also in the shape the struts of a koto, the court instruments that women might play during social events in the garden. As we strolled through the garden, we saw one lovely scene after another.
A young Japanese couple were taking pictures of themselves in traditional dress. I find this an very interesting revival.
Mori took us through the Seisonkaku, the large Japanese villa built in 1863 by Maeda Nariyasu, the thirteenth daimyō, as a retirement home for his mother. Photographs, unfortunately, are now allowed here, and though we would probably have taken some anyhow, at least without flash, if we were by ourselves, we felt that we did not want to get Mori in trouble here. It is a remarkable house, largely traditional in style, yet showing some of the signs of the openness to the west that characterized the Meiji era. It still has the original Persian carpets and electric lights that were installed when the crown prince, later to be the Emperor Taisho, came to Kanazawa for a visit.
After a little over four hours, it was time for Mori to leave us. She finished the tour by bringing us to the Noh Museum. John loves theater, so we had asked to come here. There was a fantastic display of kimonos.
That last one is my favorite, and although it looks stunningly modern, it was made and used before Admiral Perry landed his fleet here. There were also a large collection of masks.
Volunteers at the museum allow visitors to try on becoming a Noh actor. A young woman put on everything.
John asked if he could do the same, but the woman told him that he could only do the mask.
It was still pretty effective.
After that, we went to the Myoryuji Temple, commonly called the “Ninja” temple.
The temple has some connection with the priest Nichiren, founder of one of the principal sects of Japanese Buddhism. It does NOT have any connection with ninjas. In the Edo period, ninjas were essential, but as spies and assassins the work they did was dishonorable and so they were not given the same kind of respect as samurai. The temple was given the ninja moniker because it has all kinds of hidden passageways and traps. I was never completely clear why this was. I understood that sometimes the daimyo might be in the temple and that this could be a place for an assassination attempt. But some other things I read made it sound like this was also a place where samurai might be stationed.
Part of the reason I was never clear is that the tour was conducted in Japanese. We were given an English guide as we went through it, but this was obviously not really a completely satisfactory substitute for the information provided in Japanese. Photos were forbidden and nobody seemed to be trying to take any even surreptitiously. The guide was a rather severe young woman. I kept thinking that if she were Catholic instead of Buddhist she would probably have a name like Sister Peter Canisius. While she gave the tour in Japanese she occasionally barked order to us in English referring to us as “foreigners.” “Foreigners in the back!” “Foreigners first down the stairs!”
By this time it was late afternoon and we were ready to go back to our hotel. Catching a cab is not easy in Kanazawa away from the central business district and it was not that far from hotel anyhow. And we did enjoy a bit of the view on the way. The natural setting of this city is pretty impressive.
Back in our hotel room, we enjoyed the same view.
In the evening we went out one more time. The contemporary art museum was open until eight o’clock, and it was a pretty intriguing building. The building is round, and the outside wall is completely made of glass. The collection inside, however, was not as interesting as the building. The only interesting thing, in fact, was a two story swimming pool. Here is John “under water” and
doing his Sunset Boulevard homage.
On our way home we took time to observe the full moon
a few of the early blooming cherry blossoms.
We strolled around looking for bite to eat. The place I wanted to go turned out to be closed for a private party, but we walked through some very cool, extremely Japanese neighborhoods.
Tomorrow we taken the bullet train to Tokyo, and from there we return to Los Angeles. It’s been a great trip overall.
