Kanazawa, Japan: Samurai Streets, Tea Houses and Kenrokuen

Kanazawa, Japan, on the Sea of Japan coast of Ishikawa Prefecture, is the old castle town of the Maeda lords, who ruled the rich Kaga domain here for nearly three centuries. It was not bombed in the Second World War, and its street plan still reads like a map of Edo-period society: the castle on its hill, the lanes of the samurai quarter below it, the latticed tea houses across the river and a market that has fed the city since the eighteenth century. This guide covers the Nagamachi samurai district, the Higashi Chaya tea-house quarter and Omicho Market, with practical notes on getting there, how long to stay and how much walking to expect. On Days 9 to 11 of our Walking Japan small group tour, the group arrives from Sado Island, crosses the Kurikara Pass on foot, visits Kenrokuen and spends a final morning in the old samurai streets before travelling on to Kyoto.

Kanazawa, Japan: a castle town that kept its shape

The city began as a temple town. According to Kanazawa’s own tourism office, a community grew up around the Kanazawa Mido, a stronghold of the militant Ikko Buddhist sect, from 1546; after the sect was overthrown in 1580 a castle rose on the temple site. In 1583 Hideyoshi (later Toyotomi Hideyoshi) granted the castle to his general Maeda Toshiie, and the Maeda family held it for 286 years, until 1869. Their domain was assessed at more than a million koku of rice, making Kaga the wealthiest fief in Japan after the shogun’s own lands, and the phrase “Kaga’s million koku” is still used locally as shorthand for the city’s Edo-period prosperity.

Wary of looking like a military threat to the Tokugawa shoguns, the Maeda are often said to have channelled much of that wealth into culture instead: on tea, Noh theatre, gardens and the crafts that still define the city. Kanazawa today produces more than 98 per cent of Japan’s gold leaf, according to the Japanese government’s Highlighting Japan magazine, beaten to around a ten-thousandth of a millimetre and used on everything from temple altars to lacquerware and, for visitors, soft-serve ice cream. Kaga Yuzen silk dyeing, Kutani porcelain and gold-sprinkled lacquer are all part of the same inheritance.

The castle itself lost most of its buildings to fire over the centuries, but Kanazawa Castle Park is worth an hour. Ishikawa Prefecture rebuilt the Hishi Turret, the long Gojikken Nagaya storehouse and the Hashizume-mon gate turret in 2001, using traditional wooden joinery based on Edo-period drawings and Meiji-era photographs; the surviving Ishikawa-mon gate is an Important Cultural Property. Kenrokuen, the Maeda family’s garden, lies just across the road. It deserves a page of its own, and our guide to the design and history of Kenrokuen Garden covers its six attributes, its water engineering and its seasons in detail.

The Nagamachi samurai district

A short walk south-west of the castle, Nagamachi was where many of the Maeda clan’s retainers lived. What survives is a small grid of narrow lanes lined with long earthen walls, plastered in a warm ochre and capped with tiles, with clear water running in stone-lined channels alongside. The Japan National Tourism Organization notes a detail that winter visitors notice at once: the walls are covered with straw to protect the clay from snow and frost, in the same spirit as the ropes that hold up Kenrokuen’s pines.

Most houses are still private homes, so much of Nagamachi is experienced from the lane. The best-known exception is the Nomura family residence, restored and furnished with the possessions of a prosperous samurai household. Its small inner garden, with a pond, stream and stone lantern packed into a courtyard and seen from several rooms at different angles, is the highlight for most visitors. Nearby, the Shinise Kinenkan museum occupies a restored pharmacy that once served the samurai families, two former foot soldiers’ houses are preserved as a small city museum, and the Kaga Yuzen silk-dyeing studio shows artists painting designs on silk.

The Japan National Tourism Organization notes that as samurai power declined and merchant fortunes rose, many samurai families had to sell or abandon their houses. Walking these lanes, it is worth remembering that the quiet you find here was not always dignified: by the end of the shogunate, many of these households were struggling. Oyama Shrine, dedicated to Maeda Toshiie and his wife Matsu, is a short walk away; its three-storey gate of 1875, which mixes Japanese, Chinese and Western styles and includes stained glass, is one of the more unexpected buildings in the city.

Higashi Chaya: the tea-house quarter

Across the Asano River to the north-east of the castle, Higashi Chaya is the best known of Kanazawa’s historic tea-house districts. It was laid out in 1820, when the twelfth Kaga lord, Maeda Narinaga, gathered tea houses scattered around the castle town into one licensed quarter. Its main street is paved with stone and lined with two-storey wooden houses whose ground floors are screened by fine vertical lattices, with the guest rooms upstairs. The district is a national Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings, and at dusk, when the lamps under the eaves come on, it is at its most atmospheric.

These were not tea houses in the sense of cafés. A chaya was a place where guests were entertained by geiko (known locally as geigi) with music, dance and conversation, and the tradition of admitting only those introduced by an existing patron still applies to the working houses. A few are open to visitors. The Shima tea house, built in 1820 and designated an Important Cultural Asset, shows the upstairs guest room in its original state, built for performance rather than daily life, with no cupboards and no fixed walls; matcha and a sweet can be taken overlooking its small garden. At the time of writing, bags must be left in the lockers at the entrance. Most of the other houses on the street are now shops, cafés and gold-leaf boutiques, so it is easy to spend longer here than you planned.

Higashi Chaya is not part of the tour’s programme in Kanazawa, which concentrates on the Basho sites, Kenrokuen and the samurai streets. It is well worth an evening, though, for anyone spending extra time in the city before or after a journey through Japan.

Omicho Market

Omicho Market has been Kanazawa’s kitchen for more than 300 years. The Japanese government dates it to 1721, when the Kaga authorities gathered riverside markets near the castle into one place, and today it has about 180 shops and restaurants under cover, around fifteen minutes’ walk from Kanazawa Station. Fish from the Sea of Japan is the main draw: snow crab in season, sweet shrimp, oysters and scallops, alongside the heirloom Kaga vegetables that appear on local menus. The dish most visitors come for is kaisendon, a bowl of rice topped with raw seafood.

Go in the morning, when the stalls are fullest and the restaurant queues shortest. At the time of writing, most shops keep roughly daytime hours, and many close on Wednesdays, so check before you plan a visit around it. Like Higashi Chaya, Omicho is not on the tour’s Kanazawa programme; it is an easy addition for independent time in the city.

Kanazawa on the Walking Japan tour

The tour reaches Kanazawa at the end of Day 9, after a day on Sado Island, with its gold-mining past and rugged southern coast, and a late-afternoon ferry from Ogi to Naoetsu on the mainland, arriving in the city by mid-evening.

Day 10 is a walking day in Basho’s footsteps. From Isurugi Station the group sets out over the Kurikara Pass, the old crossing between the provinces of Etchu and Kaga, now the border of Toyama and Ishikawa. The route follows undulating mountain paths that Basho himself walked, passes through a well preserved post town on the ancient highway, and visits temples and shrines mentioned in his poetry. It also crosses the site of a famous medieval battle: in 1183 Minamoto no Yoshinaka, often called Kiso Yoshinaka, routed a much larger Taira army here, and according to the later war chronicle Genpei Jōsuiki, though not The Tale of the Heike, he drove several hundred oxen with burning torches tied to their horns towards the Taira army. Basho, who deeply admired Yoshinaka, crossed in 1689 and visited the battlefield, before descending into Kaga and on to Kanazawa. In the late afternoon the group visits Kenrokuen.

Basho’s own stay in Kanazawa was coloured by grief. According to the city’s tourism office, he arrived in 1689 hoping to meet a local poet, Kosugi Issho, only to learn that Issho had died the year before. At a memorial gathering at Gannen-ji temple he wrote one of the most anguished verses of his journey, calling on the grave mound itself to move, his weeping voice become the autumn wind. On Day 11 the group spends the morning walking through the old streets of Kanazawa, visiting an old samurai precinct and places mentioned in Basho’s poetry. Lunch is a full kaiseki meal in a former Kaga clan retainer’s house overlooking the Sai River, before the journey to Kyoto in the mid-afternoon. Our guide to Kyoto, the old imperial capital picks up the story there, and our introduction to walking Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North sets Kanazawa in the context of the whole route.

Is Kanazawa worth visiting?

Yes: Kanazawa is one of the best places in Japan to see a complete Edo-period castle town at walking scale, without the crowds of Kyoto. In two or three compact districts you can see how a daimyo, his samurai, the merchants and the entertainers lived, and the crafts the Maeda patronised are still made and sold here. The January 2024 Noto Peninsula earthquake caused severe damage on the peninsula to the north, but Kanazawa, around 100 kilometres from the epicentre, came through with comparatively light damage, and most of its sights reopened within days. Recovery on the Noto Peninsula itself is still under way, so check the latest local advice before travelling further north.

How many days do you need in Kanazawa?

Two full days is a comfortable minimum for Kanazawa. That allows one day for the castle park, Kenrokuen and Nagamachi, which sit close together, and another for Higashi Chaya, Omicho and a museum or craft workshop. A third day lets you add a walk along the Sai and Asano rivers, the Teramachi temple district where several Basho sites are found, or simply time to sit in a tea house.

How do you get to Kanazawa from Tokyo and Kyoto?

From Tokyo, the Hokuriku Shinkansen has run direct to Kanazawa since 2015, and the fastest Kagayaki services take about two and a half hours. From Kyoto or Osaka, the route changed when the Shinkansen was extended to Tsuruga in March 2024: you now take the Thunderbird limited express to Tsuruga and change there for the Shinkansen to Kanazawa. Check current timetables and seat reservations before you travel.

How much walking does Kanazawa involve?

Kanazawa itself is gentle walking: the main districts are flat or gently sloping, with the castle park and Kenrokuen on a low rise in the centre. Nagamachi’s lanes and Higashi Chaya’s main street are paved with stone, and the distances between them are short enough to walk or cover by city bus. The Kurikara Pass is a different matter, with steady climbs and descents on mountain paths, and the Walking Japan tour as a whole is rated Activity Level 3 – Moderate to Challenging, with up to about five hours of walking a day. Good walking shoes, a daypack and a waterproof layer are essential, and an Odyssey Program Leader travels with the group throughout.

Kanazawa rewards slow looking: the lattice of a tea-house window, the straw on a samurai wall, a verse cut into stone where Basho mourned a fellow poet. On the Walking Japan tour, a small group of up to 16 travellers walks into Kaga the way the poet did, over the Kurikara Pass from the east, before travelling on to Kyoto.