Kanazawa II · The new

This is part two of a four-part series about our family trip to Kanazawa.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, Kanazawa has been at the top of my list ever since I first visited Japan a decade earlier. What makes the city so unusual is that, like Kyoto, it survived World War II unscathed.

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Other major cities like Tokyo, Osaka, and of course, Hiroshima and Nagasaki could not say the same thing. Major Japanese cities that had any industrial or military importance were almost entirely destroyed.

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Kyoto was spared because of its cultural importance. Kanazawa was spared because bombing it had no strategic purpose. That was the case because of the actions of the Maeda clan centuries ago. More on that later.

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Importantly, the result of Kanazawa’s survival is that its legacy as a cultural center has continued uninterrupted for over five centuries. It’s a rare place where one can see different slices of these five centuries living side-by-side.

Kanazawa Omotesando

As we usually do, we rented a whole home to fit the four adults and two children in our family. The home, which felt gargantuan by Japanese standards, was nestled within a quiet neighborhood. We were half an hour by walk from most of the attractions in the Kanazawa city center. So, we frequently walked to and from the home.

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Many of our walks took us through a pedestrian-only street. The first time, I didn’t think much of it, aside from how convenient it was to have such a long path bereft of cars. As we continued to walk through, I started to notice more — the drain running along the center of a tiled section, beautiful lamps unlike others around the city, signs here and there identifying the street as “Kanazawa Omotesando”.

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I’ve since learned that there is quite a lot of history hidden away on this street. Centuries ago, the Kanazawa Higashi Betsuin (金沢東別院) Buddhist temple, which is found at the center of the path, attracted stalls and shops nearby selling to pilgrims and monks. This temple town continued to grow and eventually became a full-fledged commercial area. Then, in the 1950s, the local merchants organized and turned it into a shōtengai, a uniquely Japanese form of covered shopping arcade.

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These were the center of commerce for cities across Japan until the height of the bubble era, when fully indoor malls began to compete with and eventually leave the shōtengai barren. That’s why, in 2006, the roof was removed and the street was renovated and renamed. Today, there are cafés and boutiques, like the one pictured above.

21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art

Further south and across from Kanazawa Castle on a green field lays a building that appears almost like a coin that Godzilla dropped. The circular glass rim surrounding it betrays very little about what is inside.

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This museum is the work of SANAA, the architecture practice founded by Pritzker Prize winners Ryue Nishizawa and Kazuyo Sejima, who also designed a train I’ve written about before.

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Viewed from above, the building looks like a work of geometric abstract art — a series of rectangular shapes and one circle irregularly placed within the coin-like form. This stamp-like shape also functions as a logo for the museum.

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Each of these shapes corresponds with a different space within. The building is, by design, ambiguous both about how one can travel through it and about what it can be used for. There are some spaces that are open to the public with no ticket required, such as lounges, the café and a library with story time for children. There are also several paid galleries.

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Of course, we couldn’t finish our trip to the museum without a visit to the most iconic work, Leandro Erlich’s The Swimming Pool. I was afraid that being one of the most photographed artworks in Japan, it would feel like a gimmick.

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Instead, we found ourselves waving to complete strangers from above and doing the same when we had a chance inside. The blurry illusion of water was enough to break down some of the barriers I often feel in Japan.

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D.T. Suzuki Museum

If there is a single person to be credited with spreading Zen Buddhism to the West, it is Daisetsu Teitaro (D.T.) Suzuki. Born in Kanazawa, he became fluent in Japanese, English, Chinese and Sanskrit. Over the course of his lifetime, he wrote over one hundred books about Zen Buddhism and gave many lectures, the most famous of which are his Columbia University lectures from the 1950s.

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These books and lectures drew many Western artists into the Zen Buddhism orbit. Many, like composer John Cage, poet Jack Kerouac, psychologist Carl Jung, and painter Jasper Johns, went on to cement their own legacies as part of the Western cultural canon.

The D.T. Suzuki Museum is a work of architecture honoring his teachings. The building bears both the influences of traditional Zen architecture and the telltale modernist motifs of its architect, Yoshio Taniguchi. He was responsible for the MoMA renovation that opened in 2004, and for the Gallery of Hōryūji Treasures, which I included in my Japan museum guide.

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The building comes in three parts: the entrance pavilion and garden, the exhibition hall and garden, and the contemplation space — a building surrounded on three sides by a pool of water.

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While there, we were lucky to be joined by rain. The pitter patter of raindrops provided the soundscape needed to shift into a more contemplative mood. They also made visible the nonexistent division between inside and out, self and environment.

Hakomachi

We made sure to visit the famous Ōmicho Market, Kanazawa’s largest fresh food market with centuries of history. We saw some of the same dynamics as Tokyo’s Tsukiji market, with restaurants serving freshly caught seafood.

Right across the street is Hakomachi, a small shopping mall housed inside a cubic-crystal-shaped modern building featuring indie shops.

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Our favorites were Ohako, which crafts Baumkuchen made from rice flour grown nearby, and the Fukuro Project, which sells salts and other dried goods packed with flavor.

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Komatsu no Mori

Of all the modern attractions in and around Kanazawa, Komatsu no Mori screams “modern” more than any other. As we stepped out of the Shinkansen at Komatsu Station, we saw it immediately. The giant yellow 930E Super-Large Dump Truck and PC4000 Hydraulic Excavator tower above all else, surrounded by adults and children looking up in awe.

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The park was chock full of activities for our children, and a history museum that tracked the company’s progression from selling small tractors all the way to its present status as a global leader.

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In the middle of our visit, we had lunch at Komatsu KABULET, a food court-style establishment that served up noodles, coffee, and beer alongside a store with local packaged food and souvenirs. As a bonus, each entrée came with a chance to play vintage wooden arcade games that our youngest was surprisingly good at.

Why here?

Walking through Kanazawa’s contemporary spaces — SANAA’s glass cylinder, Taniguchi’s contemplative pools, Komatsu’s towering machinery — I kept thinking about a question I couldn’t yet answer.

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Why here? Why did this mid-sized city become a place where contemporary culture could flourish alongside five centuries of tradition?

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The answer, I would learn, lay not in the new Kanazawa, but in the old — in decisions made four hundred years ago that echo through the city to this day.

Thanks to Q for reading drafts of this.