Kanazawa: the castle town the bombs never found

Kanazawa was rich — the Maeda clan governed the second-largest domain in the country, measured in rice — and it was never bombed, so the old city survived where most of Japan's did not. That is why the wooden districts here feel continuous rather than reconstructed. In Higashi Chaya, the lattice-fronted teahouses still stand in rows along a single street, one of them, Shima, open as a museum with its upstairs performance rooms intact. Nagamachi is the samurai quarter: earthen walls jacketed in straw mats through the winter, narrow canals, and the Nomura house with a garden squeezed into a courtyard.

Kenrokuen is the reason many people come. It is counted among Japan's three great gardens, and its name means the six attributes — spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water and views — that a perfect garden was supposed to combine but rarely could at once. In November the gardeners rig the pines with yukitsuri, ropes fanned out from central poles to keep heavy snow from snapping the branches, and the effect is closer to sculpture than maintenance.

The city still makes things. Ninety-nine percent of Japan's gold leaf is beaten here, thin enough to lay over ice cream, lacquerware and temple ceilings; Kutani porcelain and Kaga yuzen silk dyeing come from the same tradition of feudal patronage. Omicho Market has sold Sea of Japan seafood on the same site for three centuries — snow crab in winter, sweet raw shrimp year-round, and kaisendon rice bowls at the counters. Add the circular glass building of the 21st Century Museum and Kanazawa stops being only a stop on the way to the Alps.