Why You Need to Visit Kanazawa
Don’t miss the “Mini-Kyoto” on the Japan Sea coast
After living on and off in Japan for 25 years, I hate to admit I made my first visit to Kanazawa this month. What an enchanting city!
Why didn’t I come here before? In my own defense, for most of those years, Kanazawa wasn’t easy to get to from Kobe, and the real Kyoto was less than an hour away, so I didn’t see much need to visit a mini version. What a mistake that was.
The opening of the Hokuriku Shinkansen from Tokyo to Toyama and Kanazawa in 2012 made the region an easy weekend getaway for those in Tokyo. With the extension of the shinkansen to Fukui and Tsuruga starting this March 16, Kanazawa is now easier to reach for the Kansai crowd, too.
What I found in Kanazawa was an extremely tourist-friendly city. The main tourist sites are all within 2 km of the train station, making it very walkable. There’s also a convenient bus loop that goes past just about everything you’ll want to see. The area surrounding the new train station is filled with shops and restaurants and brand new hotels.
Although its current population of around 400,000 makes Kanazawa only the 35th largest city in Japan, at the end of the Edo period, it was the 5th largest, behind only Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, and Nagoya, and the largest on…
