Kanazawa is one of Japan's great hidden treasures: a city that was once as rich and refined as Kyoto, but which mass tourism has not yet overwhelmed. For almost three hundred years it was the capital of the Kaga domain, ruled by the Maeda clan, whose fortune —measured at one million 'koku' of rice, the largest in all of Japan after the shogun— paid for perfect gardens, art collections, noh theatre schools and luxury crafts. And since the city was never bombed during the Second World War, all of that heritage has survived intact to this day.
Strolling through Kanazawa is like stepping into feudal Japan, unfiltered: Kenroku-en garden, considered one of the three most beautiful in the country; the lanes of the Higashi Chaya geisha district, with teahouses behind wooden lattices where gold leaf still gleams; the samurai residences of Nagamachi, with their earthen walls and canals. And all of this sits alongside a surprisingly modern side: the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, a circular glass building with Leandro Erlich's famous 'swimming pool', is one of the most visited museums in Japan.
This guide covers the essentials of Kanazawa with a practical, warm eye: how to plan your visit to Kenroku-en and the castle, what to see in the historic districts, where to try the super-fresh seafood at Omicho Market and Sea of Japan sushi, how the gold leaf workshops work (Kanazawa produces 99% of all the gold leaf in Japan) and how to get around. A city to savour slowly, far from the bustle of the big tourist routes.
Kanazawa began as a temple town built around a fortress of the Ikko Buddhist sect, but its history changed forever in 1583, when the warlord Maeda Toshiie, a general under Oda Nobunaga, took possession of the castle and made it the capital of the Kaga domain. Under the Maeda clan, which ruled until 1869, Kaga became the richest domain in Japan, producing one million 'koku' of rice. Aware that their enormous wealth could arouse the suspicion of the Tokugawa shogunate, the Maeda avoided any military ambition and poured their fortune into culture: they were patrons of art, noh theatre, the tea ceremony and the crafts (gold leaf, Wajima lacquer, Kutani porcelain, Kaga-yuzen dyed silk). They built Kenroku-en garden and filled the city with samurai and geisha districts. Because Kanazawa had no heavy industry, it escaped the bombings of the Second World War, and its historic centre has miraculously survived whole to the present day. The full story, with its lords and its artisans, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Mountain Japan: the samurai city of Kanazawa, the wooden old town of Takayama and the thatched-roof villages of Shirakawa-go, among the Japanese Alps.
Read the history of Chubu (Japanese Alps) →If you only have one day, take a guided tour on the first one: it sets up the rest of your trip and saves you a lot of walking. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. They have 4 activities in Kanazawa. And there are free tours here: you book without paying and tip the guide whatever you think at the end, so trying one costs you nothing. Have a look below: tap any of them to see them all.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became the capital of a samurai domain, Kanazawa was a religious town. In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Kaga region (roughly the southern half of today's Ishikawa) saw one of the most extraordinary episodes in Japanese history: the Ikko-ikki, a league of peasants, monks and local lords bound together by the Buddhist faith of the Jodo Shinshu school (the 'True Pure Land school'). In 1488 these rebels overthrew the province's military governor and set up what some historians have called, with a certain licence, 'a peasant republic'. For almost a century it was a self-governing territory under the authority of the temple, something almost unheard of in feudal Japan.
The heart of that religious power was the Oyama Gobo, a fortified temple built in 1546 on a hill between two rivers, the Sai and the Asano, on the exact spot where Kanazawa Castle stands today. A town grew up around the temple. The name 'Kanazawa' means 'marsh of gold' or 'golden marsh', and it comes from an old legend about a peasant called Imohori Togoro, who is said to have found flakes of gold while washing sweet potatoes in a spring. That spring, the 'Kinjo Reitaku', the golden spring, can still be seen in the castle garden. It's a poetic coincidence that the city of gold got its name centuries before it became Japan's capital of gold leaf.
The Ikko-ikki era ended by force. The great unifier Oda Nobunaga saw these armed religious powers as a threat to his plans and launched ruthless campaigns against them. In 1580 his generals took the Oyama Gobo and brought Kaga to heel. The temple town gave way to the castle town, and with that began the most glorious chapter in Kanazawa's history.
The real founder of the Kanazawa we know today was Maeda Toshiie (1537-1599), one of the most loyal and capable generals of the unification era. He had served Oda Nobunaga since he was young, earning the nickname 'Yari no Mataza', 'Mataza of the spear', for his skill with that weapon. After Nobunaga's death he sided with Toyotomi Hideyoshi. As a reward for his service, in 1583 Hideyoshi gave him the government of Kaga, and Toshiie moved into Kanazawa Castle, which became his headquarters and the capital of his domain.
Toshiie was a man of arms, but also a careful administrator. He knew that his house's strength depended on loyalty to the central power and on the economic development of his lands. He began strengthening the castle and organising the town around it. His wife, Maeda Matsu (known as 'Omatsu no Kata'), was an influential figure, educated and politically skilled, and she helped secure the clan's future. Toshiie's arrival at the castle is still celebrated every June at the Hyakumangoku Matsuri, the 'million koku' festival, Kanazawa's biggest, with a grand historical parade.
The turning point came in 1600, after Hideyoshi's death, when Japan split between the supporters of Tokugawa Ieyasu and his rivals. Toshiie's son, Maeda Toshinaga, made a decision that would shape the family's destiny: he backed Ieyasu, the winning side at the Battle of Sekigahara. The reward was huge. The Maeda had their domain confirmed and enlarged until it had the largest rice output in all of Japan. The million-koku Kaga Domain was born.
To understand Kanazawa, you need to understand what 'a million koku' meant. The koku was the unit used to measure wealth in feudal Japan: about 180 litres of rice, the amount reckoned to feed one person for a year. A domain's rice output (its 'kokudaka') set its rank, its power and the number of samurai it could support. With an official 1.025.000 koku, the Kaga Domain (which covered Kaga, Noto and Etchu, today's Ishikawa and Toyama) was by far the richest in Japan after the shogun's own lands. The Maeda were the greatest 'tozama' lords in the country, meaning lords with no blood ties to the Tokugawa.
All that wealth put the Maeda in a delicate position. The Tokugawa shogunate kept a wary eye on powerful lords, and a house this rich could easily be seen as a threat. The Maeda responded with a brilliant strategy that would define Kanazawa's character for good. Instead of building up military might, which would have alarmed Edo, they poured their fortune into culture and the arts. They became great patrons of noh theatre, the tea ceremony, calligraphy, painting and, above all, the decorative arts and luxury crafts.
Under their patronage, Kanazawa developed the crafts that are still its trademark today: gold leaf (kinpaku), hand-dyed Kaga-yuzen silk, brightly coloured Kutani porcelain, lacquerware, Ohi pottery and refined traditional sweets (wagashi). The Maeda brought in the best craftsmen in the country and set up workshops, schools and a culture of refinement that spread through the whole city. Kanazawa became a cultural capital that rivalled Kyoto, with a lively artistic scene kept going by the generosity of its lords. That strategic choice to trade swords for brushes is the reason the city is so rich in heritage today.
Under Maeda rule, Kanazawa grew into one of the largest cities of Edo-period Japan, with more than 100.000 people at its peak. Only Edo, Osaka and Kyoto were bigger. Its layout followed the logic of the castle town (jokamachi): the castle and Kenroku-en garden at the centre, the samurai quarters around them, the merchant and artisan districts further out, and on the edges, belts of temples that also served as defences. The Maeda required their samurai to live in the city, so warrior residences ended up covering about 70% of the urban area.
Whole neighbourhoods from that layout survive, and today they're Kanazawa's big draw. In Nagamachi, at the foot of the castle, you can still walk the winding lanes and mud walls of the samurai residences, with the Nomura House and its garden showing how the warrior class lived. In the teahouse districts, Higashi Chaya, Nishi Chaya and Kazue-machi, officially licensed in 1820, a culture of refined entertainment flourished. Geishas (called 'geiko' here) entertained merchants and samurai with shamisen music, dance and conversation in elegant 'chaya' with wooden lattice fronts.
Kenroku-en garden was developed by generation after generation of Maeda lords from the mid-17th century as the castle's outer garden. It became the ultimate expression of that refinement: a strolling garden designed with such perfection that, centuries later, it would be counted among the three most beautiful gardens in Japan. The whole city breathed that mix of feudal power and exquisite culture, and you can still feel it walking its streets.
The Meiji Restoration of 1868 brought the Japan of the samurai to an end. In 1869 the Maeda formally handed their domain over to the imperial government, and in 1871 the abolition of the domains (han) turned Kaga into the new Ishikawa Prefecture, with Kanazawa as its capital. The samurai class that had supported the city lost its privileges and stipends, and many artisans who depended on the patronage of the Kaga court went through hard times. Kanazawa, once the fourth-largest city in the country, was left out of the major industrial and railway modernisation that transformed other Japanese cities.
Oddly enough, that relative stagnation turned out to be a blessing for its heritage. Kanazawa never filled up with factories or heavy industry, and in the 20th century that had a decisive consequence. During the Second World War, when American aircraft levelled one Japanese city after another with firebombing raids, Kanazawa wasn't a priority military target and escaped destruction. While Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya, Hiroshima and dozens of other cities were reduced to ashes, Kanazawa's historic centre, with its samurai quarters, geisha districts, temples and wooden houses, survived practically intact.
That survival makes Kanazawa a precious rarity. It's one of the few large Japanese cities where the urban fabric of the Edo period has come down to the present in one piece, without the brutal break that the war forced on almost the entire country. That's why walking through Nagamachi or Higashi Chaya today doesn't mean touring a reconstruction: these are real streets that have changed little in two centuries.
For much of the 20th century, Kanazawa was a slightly out-of-the-way gem. It was hard to reach, so international tourism, which stuck to the Tokyo-Kyoto-Osaka axis, mostly passed it by. That changed overnight in March 2015 with the opening of the Hokuriku shinkansen extension, which cut the trip from Tokyo from almost four hours to about two and a half. The city had already taken great care of its heritage, and now it opened up to the world. Today it's one of the most popular destinations for people looking for a traditional Japan that's less crowded than Kyoto.
Few places have blended heritage and the avant-garde as well as Kanazawa. To its feudal heritage (Kenroku-en, the castle, the historic districts) it added the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in 2004, a bold glass disc designed by the SANAA studio that became a magnet for art and design lovers, with Leandro Erlich's famous 'swimming pool' as its emblem. In 2009 UNESCO added it to its Creative Cities Network in the field of crafts and folk art, in recognition of how its traditional crafts have carried on.
Because above all, Kanazawa is still the city of gold and craftsmanship: 99% of Japan's gold leaf is made here, and its workshops keep producing the Kutani porcelain, Kaga-yuzen silk, lacquerware and refined sweets it inherited from the Kaga court. Food is another point of pride: seafood from the Sea of Japan, sushi, winter crab and Kaga cuisine. Four centuries after Maeda Toshiie moved into the castle, the 'golden marsh' still lives up to its name. It's a city where gold, art and good taste are part of everyday life.
