The Mysterious City Of Gold

If it’s gold you’re after then forget about the Incas and head to Kanazawa – they’re giving the stuff away.

98% of Japan’s gold leaf is produced in Kanazawa, and there are a number of gold (and silver) leaf shops in the area. After an early visit to one of the top three gardens in Japan (Kenrokuen – it was nice enough, but we’re too early to see the autumn colours, too late for the spring flowers, and way off seeing the intricate system they have in place to stop tree branches snapping when covered in snow, so I think we missed out a little), we headed out to take a look at one of these shops.

The moment we walked through the door a woman hurried us through another door, asked us to take off our shoes, and handed us a pamphlet. We were left standing in front of a woman sitting on the floor in front of a low table, with a pile of paper in front of her, and a box of torn up pieces of gold leaf beside her. Two more shoppers soon joined us, and the woman on the floor began to explain (in Japanese to the the other customers, in mime and the occasional English word to us) the process of how a lump of gold ends up being a sheet 1/10,000 of a millimeter thin. There’s basically a lot of rolling and pressing, with some special papers used to help the process.

She sat back down at her table and resumed her part of the process – taking the flattened sheets and cutting them to a standard size. It was amazing to watch. She picks up a single sheet with wooden tweezers (very similar to chopsticks), lays it on the cutting board, blowing on it to get it sit flat. Then using a bamboo frame she trims it down to a 10cm square, picks this up and lays it between sheets of paper (the pile we saw earlier) and then blows off the excess into a box of offcuts. The whole thing happens quicker than the time it took you to read this.

After cutting a few sheets, the woman handed Holly one of the offcuts, and gestured for her to rub it into her skin. I had read that some places in Kanazawa offer a gold leaf facial, though I’m not clear on what the benefits of this are meant to be. I suppose if you can afford it, you don’t really need to worry about whether it’s actually doing anything for you.

We left the cutting room and went back to the shop, where some glasses of tea were waiting for us…with flakes of gold leaf floating on top. And once we’d drunk those we were handed a bottle of hand lotion containing gold leaf to use. I guess they hope that all this generosity will encourage purchases from the shop, which sells everything from gold leaf Hello Kitty figures to gold leaf cakes (which I later had a sample of in the train station food hall – delicious, but I don’t think that had a lot to do with the gold). Upstairs were some more serious items (folding screens covered in gold going for millions of yen), as well as toilets with gold covered walls and soap containing gold.

For the rest of the day we kept seeing souvenirs with gold leaf worked into them somehow. It seems in Kanazawa, all that glitters really is gold.