October 16, 2008
Aha! I found my widget for transferring pics to the computer!
I'd been laid up a few days with a cold, a foot injury and there had been days of rain from a typhoon that hovered offshore. As my entire discretionary budget after various fiascoes had ended up being <$400...for a month in Tokyo...I was coming to the end of my financial tether. Nevertheless I was determined to see something else not in the Tokyo area and as I was blessed with a rail pass transportation costs were not an issue. The problem was that touristy places tend to require money, so with 3 days and ~
70 bucks left, I looked for something off the beaten path and cheap.
Kanazawa is unusual in that it is one of the few large cities that was outside the range of the B29s in World War Two. Reportedly much of the Edo period architecture remains unscathed. It is not on a bullet train line and can only be reached from Tokyo via a 6 hour overnight trip from Ueno station...either via a sleeper car or a normal train...as the rail pass is no good on sleeper cars I took the sitter car.
In stark contrast to the shinkansen and other trains I saw on the east coast, the train to Kanazawa was a retro special.

Unlike the non-bullet trains on Kyushu that I took to Nagasaki (but like the Shinkansen) this one was electric, but it was far less gracefully appointed. Like most older facilities I encountered in Japan, it was well maintained to the point that it appeared to have been dropped almost new out of the 1950s.

Arriving in Kanazawa station, the retro sort of feel was reinforced by the old style commuter trains that were stopping there. The stations embarking area was quite old apart from what appeared to be a recently redone floor....


The Kanazawa tour bus costs 500 yen and in the US would be a children s bus at a kiddie park. I was the first on the bus and got a seat, however as the company uses the clown car method of bus packing, and because there was an elderly lady standing, I spent the ride standing up, hunched over and contemplating how short its interior was. The only non Japanese on the bus were a young Russian couple and they, like me, were too small for the hobbit bus...so when the conductor announced that "We are about to stop at a tourist trap." (!) ..the three of us extracted ourselves with some difficulty.
Looking at the map, I saw that the whole bus route was a bit less than 10 miles. We decided that we were not getting on that hobbit bus again.
It seems that major repairs to pre Taisho period buildings are now required to use traditional techniques for things not involving plumbing or electrical repairs. At least one home was open to the public so these could be observed. The Russian couple and I went in and we guys began discussing the fact that it looked like they had standard sized boards and cuts of wood in feudal japan as well as the different techniques for running floor supports...
*
Brickmuppet....awful diplomacy since 2008.
Where the facades were not traditional, hey were often corrugated. Like many other places I had observed in Japan, (and like most of the US south) there are very wild differences in income level from door to door. Which makes for a more eclectic neighborhood
Kanazawa is full of shrines....LOTS AND LOTS OF SHRINES. There are literally hundreds of them and they are active.
Kewell
I ambled inside to discover hat they were apparently either having a big seasonal clearance sale or were going out of business, everything was 25-75% off.
I of course, was broke.....
I'll also likely spend more than 33 dollars..... which is what I spent on 2 meals, a bathouse a coke and some batteries.
Even more remarkable I never encountered any....OH NOES!!!1!
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
10:18 PM
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