Kanazawa Castle, Kenrokuen Garden

We had a nice fine day to visit the sights today. Perfect.. We made sure to visit the Chaya (Geisha) district and Kanazawa Castle and of course Kenrokuen (Six Attributes) 25 acre Garden. Kenrokuen garden is one of the three best gardens in Japan.  Over 8,500 trees and 183 different species. The park can look totally different depending on the season here and you can see that here. It's been constructed over hundreds of years and in art concepts is considered to have the six attributes of a perfect landscape. The garden was named by Matsudaira Sadanobu at the request of Narinaga. Its name was derived from the "Chronicles of the Famous Luoyang Gardens" (洛陽名園記), a book by the Chinese poet Li Gefei (李格非), and stands for the six attributes of a perfect landscape: spaciousness, seclusion, artifice, antiquity, waterways, and panoramas.

And yeah they achieved that ;)

We spent most of the day here investigating Kanazawa Castle and the surrounding Kenrokuen garden. We did grab some souvenirs we must admit before heading out to Ninjadera (Ninja Temple), which actually has nothing to do with Ninjas. It's been colloquially named this due to the amount of thought involved with implementation of deception, traps, passageways, secrets and defences. An incredible place!

 

Erin loved it to my surprise, she wondered why people rated it lower on TripAdvisor. The depth involved in this temple was incredible, there were so many hidden doors and trickery involved that it's very hard to describe without walking it through from our heads. We did a paid tour in Japanese, but had plenty of English reading material. The place had a lot of mysteriousness about it, we felt that they were also trying to keep it as Japanese as they could, that speaking it in English would detract from the feeling it should have. I might be wrong though. No photos allowed. We got to see the Maeda daimyo's beautiful scroll he wrote about the moon, mountains and mist which was still where it was hanging so long ago. The temple was built in 1643 and was made to look like a 2 storey building because the ruling shogunate wanted to make sure things were controlled and no other powers could rise. The building is actually a 4 storey building with 7 tiers cleverly disguised and contains 29! staircases. The women's and daimyo's Kimonos are still there, incredible embroidery that must have taken a very very very long time to make. Looking fairly aged now but still incredible....The Maeda lord would apparently secretly make his way through the town or through the underground passage to Kanazawa Castle ( via a well many kms away ) to pray in secret at the shrine. Loyal Samurai hid behind sliding doors that cleverly used light to see shadows of men on one side but not the other. It was easy to imagine the place under alert. There was a formal meeting room for certain situations and it's definately a lot bigger than it appears :)

Off to the big one tomorrow. Kyoto! I'll be unable to use internet on my phone tomorrow until I get a new SIM card at the next hotel. It should be there waiting for us when we arrive. I've already used up 1GB of data =) Will load Skype back up once I install the new SIM. Will be investigating Sword crafters in Kyoto and we shall try find Geisha and a nice place to have a green tea. =)