Wonderful trip report — thanks for taking the time during your travels to post. Love the details, photos and the humor. I am planning a trip to Japan in October and this is super helpful. Look forward to more!
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Agreed---that wooden-metal gate door is remarkable!
Such precision.
I am done. the craftsmanship

>> Took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kanazawa, and I'm going to say I was less than impressed.

Try the GranClass seats on the Hokuriku Shinkansen. If you are heading to Kyoto, next then you should find that seating on the shinkansen as far as Tsuruga. At Tsurugu you will transfer to a limited express train to Kyoto/Osaka.

reddy2go2 - I hope you have a wonderful trip. This is our first time and as I have posted it has surpassed all of our ideas of what it would be like. That being said, as I write this I'm in my PJs in the hotel lobby and it's raining pretty steadily, but today is museum day, so maybe it will be OK! LOL

mrwunrfl - Even as I posted, "less than impressed" I knew it was kind of presumptuous of me to judge the Shinkansen. I will look for the GranClass seats. We've been watching videos of the luxury class seats in Indonesia and they seem really nice.

KANAZAWA CASTLE
After enjoying the Gyokusen Garden we head to the castle. Now this is a bit of make believe here because I understand most of what we are going to see has been rebuilt to the exact specifications of the original castle. Fire seems to have destroyed a lot of real estate over the years here in Japan. Right now there is a really big project to rebuild the Ni-no-maru, which is where the Maeda clan, lived, did business and met with subjects. We saw a giant structure, taller than the castle that will allow them to rebuild this part of the castle and to be protected from the elements. I hope I get a chance to come back and see it! We decided to tour the re-built castle although there is not much to see. It's two long floors of exhibits, but don't expect and English type castle experience. No crown jewels!



The bridge and most at the Hashizume-mon gate

Coming into the Hashizume-mon main gate

On the first floor of the castle. More than a few people have said to skip it but we had a combo ticket with the gardens, which we are free because we are over 65. Make sure you bring your passport, this is the third of fourth time we've gotten in for free.

Model of the construction for the castle

Another gate door

Taken from the 2nd floor of the castle

This photo is the back side of the Hashizume-mon entrance

Same area different angle.

This is out of picture window in one the cafe areas. It has a running video of what the new castle buildings will look like. Behind the castle in this shot you can see the large structure that is being used to cover the rebuilt Ni-no-maru.

After a busy day of storming the castle a little ice cream is just the recipe for a hungry Samurai

KENROUKUEN GARDEN
The best for last, the Abbey Road as it were to continue my Beatle analogy, although arguably Revolver is their greatest album, but I digress! Kenrokuen Garden is glorious, 11.8 hectares of greenery, rock, water and color. Constructed by the Maedas it is considered one of the Three Greatest Gardens in Japan. It was developed over two centuries and became public in 1871. It is famous for being a Garden of 6 Attributes, which are, good beat, singable, memorable chorus and ringing guitar ending...wait, that's the Beatle again, sorry. The 6 Attributes are: spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, waterways and panoramas. The challenge is to put those altogether, how can you have spaciousness and seclusion at the same time. This garden achieves that. I am including two sets of pictures.



Entering the Gardens from the Kasturazaka entrance

Kotojitoro Lanten, one leg is shorter than the other.

Horajima Island, there is a shrine on this island

Karasakinomatsu Pine

Another shot of the island

Gankobshi Bridge

Iris' along the rive

Waterway, one of the attributes!

A few more shots from the gardens and walk home



Shot from the Gankobashi Bridge

Close up of the bridge ost

More waterways
I liked this view of the pagoda kind of hidden behind the tree

We skirted the park and took a walkway, filled with sculptures to get back to the hotel.

This was an interesting statue. Guy with Gold Hat!

The photo of the statue is one of the Maeda leaders. I assume the gold is a nod to Kanazawa's gold leaf industry. Kanazawa means marsh of gold in Japanese.

Seems like the reconstruction of Kanazawa Castle is progressing quickly. The temporary building in your pictures was not there when we visited in late 2023.

DAY 8 - NOMURA-KE SAMURAI HERITAGE RESIDENCE, MYOURYUJI (NINJA TEMPLE), GEISHA EVENINGS IN KANAZAWA
It had to happen, RAIN! We have been so fortunate and so happy that we got the castle and gardens in yesterday, because today it is pouring. We have planned on some inside activities, but you still have to get there. Kanazawa is a contrast to Tokyo in the fact that you can walk to most places from the downtown area. Tokyo, of course you know you are taking the train probably. So we are 14 minutes away from our first stop but opt for an Uber. I have fixed my Uber problem and we are good to go. First stop, Nomura-ke Residence in the Nagamachi Samurai District. The rich lords gave the Samurai these wonderful residences of which most have been destroyed. This one still exists and is on the list for a lot of tour groups to experience. The house belonged to the Nomura's who served the Maeda clan. After the collapse of the feudal system, the Samurai moved on. This house would have been part of much larger estate, when a wealthy shipowner bought it and restored it.


This picture says it all! There is a tiny entrance, with about 25 people trying to take off their shoes, shake out the umbrellas and enter at the same time!

You are greeted by this guy once you get in

One of the rooms

Some nice detail work

Shrine room

There were quite a few rooms in the house

The garden was small but I imagine a great place to relax and think about why Tom Cruise was in a Samurai movie

Looking out on the garden

Pond with rocks

Whats a pond without these guys

Garden

This stone stairway led up to the tea room

MYOURYUJI TEMPLE AND NISHA CHAYA DISTRICT
After the Nomura house, we walked along the Sai River to the Nisha Chaya District and on to Myouryuji Temple. This is one of a dozen temples in this area. This has been dubbed the Ninja temple because of all the trap doors, hiding places and hidden floors. You generally have to make a reservation and we were late so we had to wait until the next tour. The tour is in Japanese, but they give you a booklet to follow along. It was really fascinating how intricate the little hidden stairwells were and how they did little tricky-tricks in the building, well worth it. After that we went to this tiny restaurant, 6 seats around a bar and all the owner serves is Creme brulee sweet potatoes! OMG, they were so good. We met a couple, a lot younger than us, who are also on a 4 month tour. Wish we could have done it at their age, but we're still truckin', so that's good.



This is a canal in the Samurai District

The Sai River was really flowing. On the other side of the river was a city worker, I guess monitoring the water.

Heading up to the bridge that will take us to our next stop

Entrance to the temple, no pictures on the inside

You can take a photo of the outside

The sweetest sweet potato ever

This was a little cemetery next to the sweet potato, apparently too many people said, "These sweet potatoes are to die for"

These statues in the cemetery had knit caps

Another temple in the area

HIGASHI CHAYA DISTRICT
A Chaya District is an area where there was entertainment during the Geisha times. Chaya means tea house, to my understanding. Kanazawa has three different districts but I believe Higashi is the most well know or popular. As you will see we got there in the rain. There are so many historic buildings in this area and during the day it is packed, maybe not in the rain. We got there for an evening performance and to find some dinner. Most of the shops were closed by this point. We took the Loop Bus which turned out to be interesting. Our hotel gave us directions to the bus stop and we met a couple from Hong Kong, also going to the Chaya District. Bus comes, we hop on, go two stops to the Kanazawa Station and the bus ends! We have to go to another stop to continue, and of course pay again! Lesson learned. Make sure you are not at the end of the loop on a Loop Bus.







Entering into the Higashi Chaya District

Full of wet tourists

The area consists of about 5 blocks of buildings

Normally this street would be packed

Tonight it's packed with umbrellas

Shot of buildings and hills in the back

There is a path that starts here that wanders up into the hills and it's filled with temples

Neat looking window

Water has stained this building over time

This was a restaurant, very nice, that we stopped at for dinner. We sat next to a couple from Victoria, Canada who had been in the Geisha performance we attended. You can see in the window that they have plastics displays of their food. Very helpful

GEISHA EVENINGS IN KANAZAWA
My wife had read about this experience and really wanted to go, but we could not get tickets. When we got in Monday night we headed over to the Higashi Chaya distric to walk around and we saw a poster that said, "5 Shows added". We instantly booked tickets! It was a lot of fun. I wouldn't say it's touristy because it doesn't feel that way. It is, however, very well run with a presentation that has been well honed over time. There were probably about 30 people there, comfortable seating, and small enough to feel intimate. Lady Baba, the lady of the Geisha house, opens up the show, and is smart enough to make a quick reference that she is not Lady Gaga, which got a laugh all the way around. There were about 8 different Geisha songs, with two Geishas, one playing a stringed instrument the other dancing. There was drumming and a section where audience members got up to take a shot at the drums. Finally a game, that was like paper, rock, scissors that had a lot of participation. At the end we were welcome to walk around the tea house and see the various rooms, which I thought was a nice touch. We really enjoyed the show and being in a tea house made it feel authentic



Poster of the show, which you will see around town.

First thing you see when you walk up the stairs

We were in the second row

This is after the show but you can get an idea of the size of the room

At first there were no photos, but during the drum section, Lady Baba said you could take photos, and everyone went crazy. I looked behind us and every IPhone was out!

Geisha playing the shamisen

Drummer and string player. The shamisen player also sang.

All three performers. Lady Baba joined in for this but most of the time she was the emcee and talked a lot about Geisha life

Art work around the tea house.





The lady herself and us. She is very smart and says she wants this to be an experience you will remember and it will be.

DAY 9 - MORNING WALK TO THE TRAIN STATION
We have purchased tickets from Kanazawa to Kyoto using the Klook app. It worked pretty well. Sorry mrwunrfl, we are not taking the Shinkansen so we can't do the Gran Class. Instead we are taking a train that has a longer layover, and are seated in the Green Reserve seats.The Shinkansen had a shorter layover in Tsuruga and while I'm sure we could do it, we opted for more time at the layover station. I have a QR code but not the actual tickets so I've decided to walk to the station. It's only about 15 minutes from our hotel and the wife is waking up with her morning coffee. Good time to make myself scarce. This is what has been so amazing about the Japanese people so far. I go to the machine, scan the QR code and it isn't working. I always ask for help before getting frustrated so I go into the JR office, take a ticket with a number, and wait my turn. When it's my turn, I show the QR code to the young man, and he walks away from the counter through a side door and almost takes me by my arm to a ticket machine that says in BIG LETTERS, "Machine for Tourists". I scan my code and it has four options, I had punched credit card purchase, but the correct button says, Convenience Stores orThird party vendors, something like that. He walks me through it, I thank him and head back out into the rain. The point is, he walked out of the office, around the corner, to the ticket machines. Where else are you going to get that kind of service. The other night we were looking for a restaurant in the under ground mall and a woman from the grocery store, left the store and took us to the restaurant!



This gives you an idea of the massive under carriage of the train stations here. I ducked down some stairs to get out of the rain, and suddenly I'm in this spotless area, you can't call it a hall, it's too big.

When I'm in the giant, spotless, bigger than a hallway, space, I'm hearing Chopin. I get a little closer and there is an actual grand piano and some guy is playing Chopin. It's 8 in the morning! Chopin didn't even get up before 10 o'clock

Here are a bunch of travelers, I guess, sitting in this space with a TV screen, and looking out the picture windows.

This is what they are looking at. A little Zen before your trip

Small model of the structure in front of the station...

...and how it resembles a Samurai helmut

I took a shot of this the other day from the other side

Looking back up at the station entrance

You certainly did justice to Kanazawa.

>> we are not taking the Shinkansen so we can't do the Gran Class
I just learned that JR operates regional Shinkansen Tsurugi trains between Toyama and Tsuruga, via Kanazawa, which do not have GranClass. Those are in addition to the Hokuriku Shinkansen trains that go between Tokyo and Tsuruga which do have GC. So you might not have gotten it.

>> shorter layover in Tsuruga
Yes, you would have made it unless you are slow walkers. Looks like the minimum transfer time at Tsuruga is 8 min. If you are ready to go when the train arrives (standing with luggage down) then that is enough time to change platforms. Board the first caryou see at the top of the escalator and then walk between to get to your car, if necessary.

If you see a transfer time of 3 min (like in western Kyushu) then that means that you are just crossing the platform between trains, quite doable even for the thousand-year-old Japanese women.

How was the Green Car? One advantage is that they arrive at/near the exit that has an escalator in addition to stairs.

One way you might be impressed is by seeing a through train pass through your station. You won't see this, I think, at Kyoto, Shin Osala, Okayama, Hiroshima, Hakata. But according to google AI you could see it at Himeji:
There are 4 tracks in total for the Shinkansen, with two island platforms. The two inner tracks are express tracks, allowing the fastest bullet trains (like Nozomi and Mizuho) to blast through the station at their maximum speed of up to 300 km/h (186 mph).

So, get to your shinkansen platform at Himeji Station about a half hour or so before departure and you should see a Nozomi train blast on by right in front of you.

You're absolutely right about the through trains at Himeji. We saw a couple when waiting for a train to Kurashiki.

DAY 10 - Onyado Nono Hotel
This was a test post to see if I remembered how to do the embed. Thanks YK2004!

DAY 9 - CONTINUED, KANAZAWA 21ST CENTURY MUSEUM OF ART, ISHIURA -JINJA SHRINE, D.T. SUZUKI MUSEUM
After my jaunt to the train station we are ready for another rainy day. We walk to the corner to catch the Loop Bus, although Kanazawa does not have a metro / train system, they do have a bus system and the Loop buses go around to most of the tourist sites. The museum, Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Art, is 14 minutes walking and 19 minutes by bus, but it's raining and we are trying to use the old legs wisely. Although standing for 10 minutes waiting for the bus probably doesn't qualify as giving our legs a break! We do get a nice tour of the lower part of the city once on the bus. The museum is interesting, it's round and most of it is see through, meaning the walls are made of plexiglas although the exhibits are in walled off rooms. It's most famous for the "swimming pool", which is an actual swimming pool, built into the middle of the museum. The catch is that there is only about a foot of water on the top of the pool and empty underneath, so you can actually, walk into the pool, look up and see the sky and people looking down on you, think you are at the bottom of a pool. Unfortunately it's closed. The museum is a little above my head in some of the exhibitions but we still enjoyed it. Here are some photos:



Walking into the museum

There were a lot of school kids this day

This was one of the first things we saw and it was pretty mind blowing. You can see it's a sphere with strips of metal but you would spin it like a merry-go-round and a movie was being projected on it and as it turned, if it was fast enough, your brain saw the movie as if it was on a flat surface.

A floral wall

The swimming pool

You can see how you would enter it at the bottom left. As I said it was closed.

This was also an interesting piece.

It made me hungry for potato chips

This was a modern take on the shrines we'd seen in Tokyo

You can kind of get what I was talking about as a see through museum

Another shot.

This display is in front of the museum and very popular with the kids...

...in fact kids of all sizes!

I'm actually inside the museum taking a picture of these kids, then they saw me and started waving

ISHIURA SHRINE AND D.T.SUZUKI MUSEUM
Right across the street from the art museum is the Ishiura Shrine. We didn't go in but walked around it. We could have walked up the hill to some other museums. I'm trying to put the puzzle of the area together. We are just south of the Castle and there are so many other museums to visit, but it is still raining a bit so we head on. Didn't go into the shrine, it seemed like they were setting up booths for an event, but we got to see some of the outside and the Torii gates. My wife wanted to visit the D.T. Suzuki Museum, and I kept saying, you know there's nothing there. I should have kept my mouth shut because it was very calming and reminded us a little of the Getty Musuem in LA because of the architecture. I would recommend going if you are in Kanazawa. Quick tip, walking behind the museum leads to the Shofukaku Garden and the Kanazawa Nakamura Memorial Musuem. Both are worth a visit. Well, it's our last full day in Kanazawa so we head back to our hotel and our waiting suitcases and do a little packing.



Ishiura-jinja Shrine



D.T. Suzuki Museum

This was stunning once there

Another shot of the water garden

Shofukaku Garden




Entrance to the Kanazawa Nakamura Memorial Museum

DAY 10 - TRAVEL DAY TO KYOTO
I have our tickets for the trains to Kyoto. There are 8 individual tickets for the two of us. I expected 4 tickets for the two legs, I'm sure this will all be revealed once we get to the train station. Kanazawa has been a great stop I would encourage anyone to visit here. History, museums, good food, it has it all with at least 1/3 of the crowds. Our hotel, Onyado Nono Hotel , is part of bigger chain and it is very big as I have mentioned, over 250 rooms, but the attention to detail and the perks are great. We didn't get the breakfast which I heard was really good. First you have the onsen, which is really nice to soak after a day of sightseeing. At 3PM every day they have free ice cream on the thirteenth floor. In the evenings starting at 9:30PM they have free ramen. Also we spend all of our time, here at the hotel, in our PJs. That is really cool. We have been very happy with our choice of both the hotel and the city of Kanazawa.



This is how we checked in, all automated, although there was plenty of staff to walk you through the process

Elevators, three working full time

Lobby where I spent every morning at 6AM working on my Trip Report.

Ever popular coffee machines in the lobby

Long hallway shot

Really sweet decorations in the halls


Thirteenth floor, entry to the onsens straight down the hall, and if you turn behind, that is the entry to the ice cream bars

View from the relaxation room

Another view with mountains in the background