Kanazawa

Oyama Jinja

Here we are in Kanazawa, city of traditional crafts. Haven’t seen any of those yet (except in passing). Perhaps upon the morrow.

Our vision in coming here was to have a few days between Kyoto and Tokyo when we didn’t have too much to do and could relax a bit. It certainly was nice sleeping in this morning, after all the running around in Kyoto.

Kanazawa is a relatively small town as far as things in Japan go, and doesn’t seem to get a lot of foreign tourists; at least, we haven’t seen too many around. It also, by consequence, seems to have fewer English speakers than the other cities we’ve stayed in so far, and fewer English translations of things (including menus).

We thought we’d just wander around a bit today, so first off we checked out the Omicho markets. Some of the seafood looked amazing (Kanazawa is on the Japan Sea side of Japan), including fillets that I could tell, without being able to read the sign, were destined to be sashimi: they looked superb. There were also lots of live crabs and clams, as well as the biggest fish head we’d ever seen: it must have been over a foot long at least (we took some photos but you couldn’t really get the scale of it). Of course, apart from the seafood, there was also the usual mystery food, including something apparently called “salted fish guts”. We didn’t try any of that. Call us soft if you like.

Kanazawa has a famous garden, but we’d heard of another one that was supposed to be quieter (ie less full of tourists), so that was our next aim. We thought we’d cut through the Castle Park, which more or less fills the centre of the city. Walking around to the park entrance, we chanced on an open gate to a shrine, and thought we’d take a look.

The shrine was called Oyama Jinja, and it turned out to be a lovely peaceful spot. Though perhaps not as formal as some of the other gardens we’ve now seen in our travels, it was shady after the hot street, and there was an embankment surrounding it that cut out the noise of the traffic. We spent a bit of time walking around, and even found a turtle sunning himself in a warm spot. The photo above is from Oyama Jinja.

After that, we went on to Gyokusen-en garden, an early Edo period (17th century) garden. It too was beautiful, though the tranquility was somewhat lessened by the construction work going on at the garden entrance. It seems like everywhere we go something’s under construction. We had been planning to have some tea in the teahouse there, but given the noise we decided against it, which was a pity.

Then to dinner. I have to say that, although the food here in Japan has been generally wonderful, there is a focus on seafood and pork, and as a consequence I have been madly craving a steak. We’d noticed a place with a photo outside of a lovely, juicy looking steak, so I made the decision that we’d eat there.

As seems to be the habit in Kanazawa, there was no English menu, and the staff didn’t seem to speak English, either. We thought we’d get around it by pointing to the steak. What we didn’t realise was that we’d just set ourselves up for another mystery dinner: the steak was only one part of a five course meal.

So once again I don’t know what I ate, and this time I don’t even have a menu, so I’ll probably never know. What I do know is that the first three courses appeared to be more or less traditional Japanese dishes, which were then followed by the main. The main consisted of the following: pepper steak with gravy, potatoes and horseradish cream, noodles, miso soup, a bowl of rice and Japanese pickles.

My grandmother is a regular patron of her local RSL club, where one of the meals available at the Chinese restaurant is chicken chow mien with chips. It was a bit like that but in reverse: obviously the soup etc were added on there to give Japanese diners something familiar to go with their Western meal. I was happy though: the steak was superb, which is all I really wanted, and we even had a glass of red wine to go with it. Heaven.

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