- Yellow Productions Presents!
A travel guide for visiting the city of Kanazawa in Japan.
I'm Chris, and yes, this is a kimono.
You can rent kimonos in Kanazawa.
They often call Kanazawa Little Kyoto.
There's a lot of history here, there's a big castle.
Lots of neat stuff to see.
Kanazawa is also famous for its gold leaf,
so you'll see a lot of gold leaf things in the city,
including ice cream cones with gold leaf on top.
In this video, I'm going to cover the following
eight topics on Kanazawa.
First, we'll visit the Kenroku-en Garden,
considered one of the three best gardens in Japan.
We'll go across the street to Kanazawa Castle,
a large, well-restored castle dating back to 1583.
We'll then wander over to the Higashi Chaya District,
a traditional neighborhood with tea houses
where geisha perform.
We'll stop by Kanazawa's Omicho Market, which is the city's
largest seafood market, with over 200 shops and stalls.
I'll talk a little bit about transportation
in Kanazawa, driving or the bus.
I'll talk about getting Kanazawa
and how you can take the Shinkansen.
We'll then arrive into Kanazawa's JR Train Station,
which is one of the best places in Kanazawa
for shopping and food.
And finally, I'll conclude with a visit
to Kanazawa's Nagamichi Samurai District,
a district where samurai and their families used to reside.
This video is part of my series on Kanazawa.
I've got four other videos on Kanazawa, you can find links
at the end of this video or in the description below,
including renting kimonos in Kanazawa, the best sushi
in Kanazawa, the best hotel in Kanazawa, and also
the best onsen near Kanazawa.
We're gonna start this video across from the castle,
in Kenroku-en Garden.
Why?
Because it's right next to where we rented these kimonos.
The Kenroku-en Garden, it used to be part of the gardens
of the castle, it's now a public garden,
considered one of the three best in Japan.
Admission is 310 yen.
It's a traditional Japanese garden, perfect for strolling
and perfect for taking pictures in kimonos.
The garden is home to a very unique cherry blossom tree.
This one right here.
It's the garden's chrysanthemum cherry blossom tree,
where each of the chrysanthemum-looking blossoms
has 300 cherry blossom petals on each one.
One of the things I love about Japanese gardens
are how longingly they take care of the plants and trees.
Look at how many supports this tree has.
I think there's more supports than there are branches.
You can understand why a lot of these trees
need the support.
This one here has been here since the middle
of the 18th century.
It's really impressive how they trim these trees, too.
They get these really tall ladders and they prune them
almost like you're pruning a bonsai tree.
That guy has got some hand shears up in the top
of that tree, trimming it ever so precisely.
One attraction that I consistently saw the Japanese
tour guides pointing out as they were here
was actually, well, this attraction.
Apparently, being a white guy in a kimono is a sight to see.
A specialty of Kanazawa is konkuro mochi.
It's mochi and red bean on the outside, served with tea.
There's a number of these little huts
around the park in the garden.
You can sit on a tatami mat and enjoy the pond while
eating some of these unique Japanese sweets.
You can easily spend a couple hours
strolling around Kenroku-en Garden.
You can see, it's a pretty big area.
Lots of great places for picture taking, and many people
also say that, even though this is one of the three
best gardens in Japan, many people consider this one
to be the most beautiful.
Directly across from the garden is Kanazawa Castle,
right behind me, right there.
Admission to the Kanazawa Castle grounds is actually free,
but if you want to visit some of the turrets
or the storehouses, than that has the same admission price
as the garden, not the same admission, but the same price
of 310 yen to go into some of the attractions
that are here at the castle.
It's worth a visit just to come over and see it.
It looks pretty cool, it's a pretty well-kept
Japanese castle, but the gardens,
the gardens are really cooler than the castle.
The castle grounds are really quite huge.
I think they're about four times the size of the garden,
and there are vast areas of open space, which,
for Japan, is actually kind of unusual, so if you just came
from Tokyo, this might be a great place to come and relax
and get away from stuff.
I think that's why you might come to Kanazawa,
'cause it's a little bit away from busyness of everything.
Kanazawa is the second-largest city in Japan
to have escaped air raid bombings in World War II,
and because of that, it's actually quite well preserved.
This area, the Higashi Chaya area, is famous for its
historic tea houses, and most of these storefronts
used to be tea houses where geishas would perform
to entertain their guests.
There's still a couple of them that act as operating
tea houses, there's a couple that are museums,
and you can also find a famous gold leaf store,
selling products will sorts of Kanazawa's gold leaf.
There's two other big districts like this
throughout the city, and...
It also looks like the Geisha street in Kyoto,
if you've been there too.
In the gold leaf shop, they have the gold leaf storeroom,
a storeroom that they've plated with gold leaf,
to show off that 99% of Japan's gold leaf production
comes from Kanazawa.
Kanazawa has a very lively seafood and produce market,
called Omicho Market.
That's where I'm standing in right now.
It's a two-story market, it takes up a few city blocks,
there's about 200 different vendors.
It's very lively in the morning, it's very busy at lunch,
it kind of closes down after about three o'clock,
so make sure that you come here early in your day,
and you can shop for fresh produce, fresh fish,
there's some clothing shops, some souvenir shops,
and lots of great restaurants to eat as well.
And the thing to eat that the Omicho Market
are the chirashi bowls, or the seafood bowls.
Most of the restaurants close by three, so if you find
yourself here at night, there are a couple of them
on the second floor, which is where we dined.
This bowl of seafood is 3200 yen,
and it has all sorts of seafood under the sun.
Salmon roe, tuna, shrimp, and, because we're in Kanazawa,
it also has gold leaf on it.
Yes, that's edible gold.
Kind of feel like a king right now.
A note on transportation in Kanazawa.
There's not a whole lot of public transportation
around here.
There is a tourist bus that'll take you to the tourist sites
that runs every 20, 30 minutes, so it's nice to have a car
to get to some of the sites.
Parking is plentiful, but expensive.
There's a lot of big public parking garages,
and they are gonna cost you a pretty penny,
anywhere in the neighborhood of 200 yen for 30 minutes
to 300 yen to 400 yen.
They can be expensive, but you'll be paying
for the convenience to actually get there
and not waiting around, so when you get that big bill
at the end of your parking garage,
don't have a heart attack, 'cause I want you
to keep watching my videos.
Kanazawa has some really narrow streets.
Take this street, for example, right here.
This street is actually two ways.
The cars drive in the middle, but if one's coming up
behind them, they have to stop and go over to pass.
So if you are driving, make sure you don't, yeah,
see that taxi?
He takes up the whole street, just by himself.
And I've seen a truck and a car, and they don't know
what to do, so one has to pull into a parking spot
to let the truck go by.
To get to Kanazawa, you can take the newly-opened
Kanazawa shinkansen from Tokyo Station.
It goes all the way up to Kanazawa.
This would be one of the cars, it goes really fast,
and you can see, it hasn't been discovered by
all the tourists yet, so you can have the cars
almost all to yourselves.
It's a neat ride.
Out the east exit of the Kanazawa JR Station
is this really neat arch.
This arch is a symbol of Kanazawa,
you see it on all their magnets and pamphlets.
And then, over this way, there's this really neat fountain,
I've never seen a fountain that's quite
as high tech as this.
It's a fountain that tells you the time, spells out words.
Right now, it says welcome.
And then it's gonna come up and it's gonna say the time,
and it'll do that right now, so it's 7:56 PM!
That's a fountain that's bustin' out some knowledge,
I have to say.
A great place in Kanazawa for shopping and eating
is the Kanazawa train station, right here.
You might think, in a lot of places, trains are just
for trains, but train stations in Japan are often eating
and shopping hubs, 'cause everybody passes through here.
The shops are usually open 'til about eight o'clock at night
and the restaurants are often open for later.
And, of course, in the shops, you'll find plenty of places
selling that famous gold leaf Kanazawa souvenirs.
And, for restaurants, you'll probably find some of those
chirashi bowl restaurants too.
Right next to JR Kanazawa Train Station
is this amazing rotating sushi restaurant.
It is truly the best rotating sushi restaurant
I have ever eaten at.
It is so good, it deserves it's own video.
If you're interested and you want to watch it,
you can find the link to it in the description
of this video.
Kanazawa was home to some historic samurai.
In the Samurai District, you can go into
some of the samurai houses.
This was one of the lesser samurai,
and it is the family of Nomura.
You can pay 600 yen to come into this house.
It's been rated one of the top three backyard gardens
in Japan, of samurai houses.
It is an amazing garden.
I hope someday I can have a garden that has goldfish
as big as in that garden.
You can walk through the whole house and, this is really
cool here, this is the little in-house shrine.
Look at all that gold work.
Gold leaf from Kanazawa, of course.
The way you can tell how important the ranking
of the samurai was was by how much rice they got
from the emperor.
The samurai who lived in this house would get
1200 units of rice.
The samurai who lived right by the castle in the gardens,
the really nice gardens, that samurai would get
a million units of rice.
So, you can just tell, that samurai could have
a lot more people under him than this one could,
with only 1200, so this is a very little samurai.
The Nagamichi District is a whole former samurai district.
More than just that house, there's a whole bunch of
historic-looking streets here, great for pictures
and to feel what it was like when the samurai
resided in Kanazawa.
In addition to museums, maybe of the samurai houses
have been converted to cafes and gift shops.
This one's a cafe.
You'll know you're in the right place 'cause you'll see
lots of Japanese tour groups walking around.
You can always tell the Japanese tour, 'cause the tour guide
will be holding a flag and often a sign that says
what time the bus leaves.
With this group, it said 11:25.
There's also a lot of European tour groups here in Kanazawa,
more so than any other part of Japan I've been to.
Lots of Brits, Italians and Russians
that we've encountered while we were here.
One of the things I like about Japan is in the
touristy areas, they actually provide public restrooms.
So, kudos to the city planners or tourism bureaus.
And the public restrooms are actually maintained
and cleaned, what a concept.
Europe, you could learn something from this.
Thanks for watching!
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