Kanazawa
— — a city that kept its quiet rooms.
Not only on a wall.
“A castle town on the Sea of Japan coast, the seat of the Maeda lords through the Edo period and almost untouched by the bombs that flattened so much of the country. Kenroku-en still keeps its six-quality garden, the Higashi Chaya district still keeps its tea-houses, and the goldbeaters still make almost all of Japan's gold leaf in workshops behind the river.
Kanazawa, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Kanazawa is the capital of Ishikawa Prefecture, on the Sea of Japan coast of Honshu, with a population of about 460,000. It sits between the Sai and Asano rivers on a coastal plain backed by the Hakusan range. The city was the seat of the Maeda clan, the wealthiest non-Tokugawa daimyo of the Edo period, and was largely spared bombing in 1945, leaving its Nagamachi samurai quarter, its three chaya tea-house districts, and its castle grounds essentially intact.
Kenroku-en, beside the castle, is one of the Three Great Gardens of Japan, completed in stages by the Maeda lords between the 1670s and the 1840s. The name means garden of the six qualities — the six attributes the Song-dynasty writer Li Gefei held to be incompatible in a single garden: spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, water-courses, and panorama. Kotoji-tōrō, the two-legged stone lantern at the edge of Kasumi pond, is the most reproduced single object in Japanese garden photography.
Kanazawa produces about 99 percent of Japan's gold leaf, the kinpaku that gilds Kyoto's Kinkaku-ji and the lacquerware of the Hokuriku coast, hammered to roughly one ten-thousandth of a millimetre in workshops east of the river. The Higashi Chaya district, laid out in 1820, still keeps its lattice-windowed tea-houses along Higashiyama-dori, and the small Kaikaro and Shima houses are open to visitors during the day. The Hokuriku Shinkansen reaches the city from Tokyo in about two and a half hours.