Early Tuesday morning, 10/8/04, saw me boarding the Hikari bullet train at Hiroshima bound for Osaka, on the way back to Tokyo, via Kanazawa. An hour out of Hiroshima, I arrived at Himeji and did a 3-hour stopover to visit the famed Himeji Castle (subject of earlier posts). Another Hikari then took me to Shin-Osaka ("New Osaka") station where I changed to a normal express train which headed northeast to reach the coastline of the Sea of Japan. This was truly awesome rice country. Very scenic green rice-fields everywhere, in between houses, in between shop and office buildings, right up the sea, no land left idle. It was like, ummm, wall-to-wall rice-fields!
I reached Kanazawa around 3.30pm, found my hotel and promptly checked in. Japan's capital of rice, and once its 4th largest city, Kanazawa is situated on the west coast of Honshu, separated from Tokyo on the opposite side by the Alps. Spared from bombing during the War, it still retains its old quarters, one of which is the Samurai settlement. This settlement dated from the 16th century when the Kanazawa rice-rich region was ruled by Lord Maeda with his fierce 8,000 samurais, definitely well-equiped to challenge the powerful Tokugawa Shogun based in Edo (Tokyo). BTW, I also heard there was an original Geisha settlement nearby but time constraint prevented me from further exploration. :-(
Pic #1 shows the garden of a samurai house (the old man must a samurai descendant, maybe the baby too). Others show the narrow cobbled street and canal found in the samurai settlement, which is now located right behind a major shopping centre called Kohribo. The walls protecting the homes were plastered with a sort of yellow earth, topped with ceramic tiles. The water in the canal, needless to say, was clean and clear.
