JAPAN’S SECLUDED ART HAVEN
Edgy forms or classical traditions, Kanazawa immerses the visitor
The eight Japanese students seemed to be exploring underwater. Without air tanks. And in school uniforms.
As my toes dangled over the concrete lip of the swimming pool, they stood at the bottom, soundlessly giggling and waving up at me — from behind a thin sheen of plexiglass covered by an inch of water. Seemingly submerged in an empty pool.
Often, Japanese art is about serenity, although I don’t think that’s what this artist had in mind.
After two weeks of traveling across Japan, constantly finding myself being sucked into the art-viewing travel cycle of observing, snapping a few photos, maybe uploading some to Instagram, then moving on to the next exhibit, I came to Kanazawa searching for something new.
Something that surprises, that will wake me up.
I had never heard of Kanazawa until a Japanese filmmaker mentioned it to me the week before in Tokyo, saying it was a place where some of the country’s most respected artists toiled, a place that has no boundaries when it comes to what they think of as a typical art exhibit — it could be something as simple and as murderous as a hatchet poised in a glass case or as cerebral and innocent as these schoolkids before me playing in a manipulated swimming pool. I wondered if they knew they were part of the exhibit.
Either way, I seemed to be in the right place to discover Japan’s traditional crafts and modern mindbending forms of art unlike anywhere else. Easier to reach
While Japan’s big cities such as Kyoto and Tokyo draw tourists in droves for tea ceremonies, geisha performances and gimmicky robot dinner shows, Kanazawa has been a travel
blind spot to Western travelers, despite its famed fortified castle and artistic culture that draw plenty of domestic visitors.
As a UNESCO City of Crafts and Folk Art, Kanazawa has 36 distinguished types of heritage skills, with about 400 local makers plying their trade, having honed skills passed down through generations for more than 500 years.
But Kanazawa has never been an easy city to reach. Wedged between the Sea of Japan and the Japanese Alps, on Honshu’s western edge, the city has typically been reached via a five-hour train trip, plus transfers. However, the new direct Hokuriku Shinkansen (bullet train) line connecting Tokyo directly to Kanazawa started this year, making it easier and faster to reach — the trip is now just 2½ hours.
The land between the two cities is widely varied, and a window seat on the high-speed train offers a time-lapse view of the region. As I depart from Tokyo Station, the city’s concrete center quickly morphs into a suburban sprawl identical to American tract homes, then past splintered wooden villages, over river-fed rice paddies and on through flat expanses of scenic farmland where, in the fall, orange persimmons pile beneath the trees quicker than people can gather them.
We skirt around the Japanese Alps, which contrast with the emeraldgreen fields, a dark, jagged outline glowering in the distance.
All this makes arriving at Kanazawa’s new, glistening train terminal that much more shocking. So much so that rolling my suitcase beneath the geometric steel-and-glass dome, I wondered if I had gotten off at the right stop. Home to the crafts
For an introduction to the region’s lauded 36 official types of crafts, I headed to the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts, which has curated exhibits on each style of craft and informative placards in English.
With the museum nearly to myself, I had the rare space and time to wander and pause at my own pace. While I’ve been to many places that tout a particular claim to fame, this province has to be the first to offer 36.
First, I passed by Yamanaka lacquer ware — wood carved impossibly thin with slender patterns, then rubbed with raw lacquer and turned into elegant serving trays, tiered boxes and utensils for Japanese tea ceremonies. It seems to be a way to slip more beauty into everyday life — an art where functionality is as essential as aesthetics.
Next, the menacing glimmer of a double-edged sword, a tsurugi, caught my eye. Tsurugi means “sword” and is the original name of the town it’s made in (now Hakusan). But in today’s post-samurai Japan, the company now specializes in welding hatchets to order.
Kanazawans take pride in proving that making something as simple as a candle can be an art form, as is the case with the curvaceous Nanao candle, where the wick is the focus of the craft — a specific thickness and special glue used to create the ideal stable and mesmerizing flame.
The list goes on — Japan’s iconic taiko drums, scroll mounts, tufted Kaga fly-fishing baits with feathers culled from wild birds and wrapped with a golden leaf — ending with a bang: Behind the final glass case sat three bloated Noto Fireworks. In the world of Kanazawa, even fireworks are art, perfecting the chorus of sound, the color of the light, and the particular shape and dazzle of the explosion. Venice in Japan
But art transcends Kanazawa’s traditional craft canon at the 21st Century Contemporary Art Museum, a futuristic cylindrical glass building and art park. Walking through its labyrinth of illusions and thoughtprovoking exhibits feels like exploring the mind of Japanese author Haruki Murakami.
On my way out, a businessman set his briefcase on the lawn and leaned forward to a copper tube sprouting from the grass, then shouted “Kon’nichiwaaaa” into it. He paused, probably gauging how silly he might look, but his call was returned by a stranger from an unknown area of the park, and an expression of joy came over his face.
I left thinking about the patterns of surprise and playfulness strung throughout the city’s art, its charm already working on me.
I avoided the main street, a wide concrete path of fluorescent Marc Jacobs and Louis Vuitton stores, instead opting to meander through the neighboring Nagamachi district.
Many of Kanazawa’s 50 canals, once used to transport goods, flow through this area, making it feel a bit like the Venice of Japan, but without the gimmicks and crowds. The waterways slink between earthen walls and latticed wood buildings, which housed samurai during the prosperous Edo period. Art in a bottle
There are not many places in this city that art has not touched. As I continue walking, it seems that every few paces, I pass mom-and-pop stores hawking specialty handmade goods and small museums: the Yasue Gold Leaf Museum, where you can watch one of their artisans roll and hammer gold to thickness of onemillionth of a millimeter, to be used to decorate Buddhist altars and folding screens throughout Japan; the incredibly niche Kanazawa Phonograph Museum; and a Confectionery Wooden Mold Museum housing more than 1,000 molds used to make the region’s traditional rakugan sweets.
Even all the way on the outskirts of the city, in a gritty, industrial swath of town, the Fukumitsuya Sake Brewery has been making sake using water from the same well since 1625. Snow seeps into nearby Mount Hakusan, then travels underground for a century before finally reaching Kanazawa and being pumped from a humble wooden well behind the brewery.
Because the water from this particular well is believed to be responsible for the sake’s smooth quality, the brewery can never be relocated. This water and rice are the only ingredients; the style is known as junmai — the pure, unadulterated sake that accounts for only 13 percent of sakes made in Japan. Basically, it’s topshelf stuff.
A woman in the small tasting room poured me a taste of the Kyoka, a smooth sake named after a famous Kanazawa novelist, and explained to me how the sake fits into Kanazawa’s craft orbit.
“With good wine, the artisan’s role is to let the grape and soil express itself, intervening only when necessary,” she said. “But to make junmai sake, the emphasis is in the hands of the creator. How they use their hands to manipulate the rice throughout the process determines how it will taste.”
Though the brewery makes around a dozen varieties of sake, which vary from light to rich and dry to sweet, the ingredients in every one are only rice and water. Clearly, art here is not limited to just to fancy objects shown off in glass cases. Selfie-less shrine
Nor is the art of Kanazawa confined to indoors: It extends to a natural world, like the Kenroku-en Garden, part of the onceprivate Kanazawa Castle grounds that date back to the early 1600s, and is now ranked as one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan.
Still a little tipsy, I entered the gardens. A man was tying an ema, a votive wood plaque with a wish on it, to a post beside a Shinto shrine. Moss carpeted the ground and wooden ladles bobbed in a bucket of water. Unlike the selfie-stick-plagued sights of Kyoto and Tokyo, in the gardens, the only person I came across with a cellphone out was a distracted policeman trying to score a macro shot of morning dew dripping off of an azalea.
It didn’t take long to see how this landscape differed from the oftenoverstuffed gardens of the West. Plants were not laid out in straight axes or with a grandiose focal point. In fact, the craft was not about how it looked at all, but how it felt walking through it — the varying experiences different serpentine paths offered, and the little surprises along the journey.
Something flitted through me as I veered from the main concrete path and onto a steppingstone trail under the dappled purple shade of a plum grove, the bare sound of nothing surrounding me.
My imagination stirred, and my default desire to consume — to taste, drink, ogle, Instagram and speed through the boxes on my travel checklist — fell away, and in its place the urge to create something bloomed.