Kanazawa: If You Go Out In The Woods Today

Kanazawa is a 'choose your own adventure' kind of place. We apparently chose bears, lightning storms and ninjas. We also got some lovely festive snowfall. Most of it chucked down while we were out in the open. Jingle bells and let it snow, but thank goodness for 35 degree, backyard cricket Christmases.

Our hostel was closed when we reached it on Wednesday, so we passed some ramen time in a nearby cafe buried in beanshoots and mushrooms. After letting us in, our hostel host told us we could borrow gumboots from the tourist information centre. Good thing we took his advice. Having loaded up with supplies, we stepped out of the station only to be deafened by thunder and blinded by lightning. Every single woman in Kanazawa screamed. Hi there, said the outrageous thunderstorm that didn't let up until the morning we left. 

After a loud and flashy night, we got up, made omelettes, and climbed aboard the Hooville-style city loop bus. Despite the rain, we decided to tackle Kenrokuen Garden first. The garden was as striking as advertised, even in its winter state of flowerlessness and bare branches. Kanazawa's humidity famously requires the roping up of tree branches to protect them from the humid-heavy snow each winter. It's a great look. The trees all looked like umbrellas, or marionette puppets. 

When Maddy started in on how good the garden would look all blanketed in snow, someone upstairs agreed. The snow started pelting down immediately, thick and loud on our umbrellas. It didn't last too long and melted as soon as it hit the ground, but it was a nice, intensive touch of winter wonderland. 

We crossed the moat to Kanazawa Castle where a sign advertised free English tours of the castle and garden. The tour was fairly informative, especially on the subject of the castle's nail-avoiding construction techniques. However, things were cut short when our tour guide told us that we couldn't visit half the castle grounds because a bear had been sighted and was as yet on the loose. Maddy and I laughed nervously and fled without complaint. We took a lunch break back at the [safe, bear-free] station in a wonderful German-themed cafe, where I celebrated my complete Japanese cultural immersion with an apple danish. 

We then took the bus over to the Geisha quarter and visited Shima, a traditional tea house preserved in its heyday state. Its rich ambience was somewhat interrupted by the sound of tourists playing display instruments very badly. Rather than stay and sample the tea, we wandered back through the wooden buildings to wait for the bus. 

Next stop was Omi-Cho Market, in which we mistook the loads of splayed out crabs all shoved together for one giant monster crab. And then it was home time, back to our (comparatively) warm hostel where we congratulated ourselves for having braved the cold, rain and snow all day long. We had no idea what was coming. 

Friday the 13th: the day roared open, dark and thundery and split with lightening. It was really pissing down. Maddy and I cowered over our breakfast, eyeing the front door with straight up dread. I drank an extra cup of coffee for luck. Maddy really should have done the same; who knows, it might have stopped her umbrella splitting down the spine within a minute's distance from the front door. And then our knees would have been slightly less sodden by the time we got to the bus stop. Adventure!!

We had planned out the day Beijing-style: first a stint of touristing, then seek shelter in shops. It felt quite ambitious at the time, what with the furniture-throwing thunder. We got off the bus at Stop 13 (thematic) and swam to Myoryuji Temple, otherwise known as the Ninja Temple. Well, I say swam, but Maddy more or less breezed along, flirting it up with two Aussie tourists we'd dug up on the bus while I took care of the navigation business.

Of course, once we'd arrived at the temple, one of the boys mentioned their tour reservation. What tour reservation, Maddy and I asked. The one we had completely failed to arrange at the tourist office. Luckily, after complex intercom negotiations, we got ourselves on the 12pm tour and swapped the frigid cold outside for the frigid cold within. The tour started in a big room with a partitioned place of worship. It was entirely in Japanese despite the fact that the tour group was 100% linguistically inept Australian. Good thing they had little tour info folders for us, really.

We got to see loads of the traps installed in the temple, which, we soon learned, wasn't actually for ninjas, but for samurai soldiers enlisted to protect Kanazawa Castle. There's rumored to be a secret passageway linking the temple to the castle set three metres above water level in the temple's well. You'd think some uni students back in the castle campus era might have tried testing this out, but there you are. We were shown stairs that allowed the watcher to see spearable foot shadows, and a pair of doors which cleverly opened to the outdoors on one side and to a concealed hiding space on the other. There was a room for samurai containing multiple hidden exits to aid surprise attacks, and a grim little room lined with four tatami mats for the commander's personal belly-stabbing use in the event of defeat. The door to this room was one-way; once closed, it couldn't be opened from the inside. 

Another interesting fact about the Ninja Temple is that, while appearing to stand at the regulation two storeys, tricky design gave it a whopping seven floors. The top two of these were gloriously heated. This made it harder to leave, and when they booted us into the cold, Maddy and I hurtled through the sleet in search of shelter. Cafe lattes saved my life in Kanazawa. We spent the remainder of our afternoon in Starbucks, then Uniqlo, then in the wrong queue at the train ticket centre, then in the right queue, then finally, finally home. Twelve mugs of tea later we had almost defrosted. 

We got up on Saturday morning and could only shake our fists at the utter lack of rain. Still, it meant we arrived at the station as undraggled as ever, ready to take on the final destination in our tour of Japan: Tokyo.