The best things to do in Kanazawa are Kenrokuen, the rebuilt castle beside it, the Higashi Chaya teahouse district across the Asano River, the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art and the seafood counters of Omicho Market. All five sit on the loop bus route. Give the city two days, arrive on the Hokuriku Shinkansen rather than by air, and take the garden first thing in the morning before the coaches reach it.
Kanazawa was the seat of the Maeda lords, whose Kaga Domain was assessed at more than a million koku of rice and made them the wealthiest samurai house outside the Tokugawa. That money went into gardens, tea houses, lacquer, dyeing and gold leaf rather than into war, and because the city was never bombed in the Second World War, most of what it bought is still standing. Three chaya districts, a samurai quarter with its water channels running, and one of the three great gardens of Japan sit within a twenty-minute bus ride of each other. The ten entries below run roughly west to east, from the castle and Kenrokuen across the Asano River to Higashi Chaya.
Kenrokuen is one of the three great gardens of Japan, alongside Korakuen in Okayama and Kairakuen in Mito, and the only one whose name is an argument: "the garden of six attributes", meaning spaciousness and seclusion, artifice and antiquity, water and a view, qualities a Chinese treatise said no single garden could hold at once. The Maeda spent close to two centuries proving otherwise across 11.4 hectares, and the result is less a set of tableaux than a circuit that keeps rearranging itself as you walk. The Kotoji stone lantern on two unequal legs is the shot everyone comes for. Come at opening and you get it without a queue; come from November and you get the yukitsuri, the rope cones rigged to hold branches up under Hokuriku snow.
Time1.5 hr
CostTicketed
Best atOpening time
TipThe yukitsuri ropes go up from 1 November and are the reason to visit in winter
Maeda Toshiie took the castle in 1583 and his family held it until the domains were abolished. Fire took most of it more than once, so what stands now is reconstruction, but reconstruction of an unusual kind: the Hishi Yagura turret and the long Gojikken Nagaya storehouse were rebuilt in traditional joinery, and the interiors are left open so you can read the frame. The park itself is free and enormous, the rebuilt buildings are ticketed, and the white lead-tiled roofs are the detail to look for. Walk in from Kenrokuen through the Ishikawa-mon gate rather than starting at the main entrance and the sequence makes more sense.
Time1.5 hr
CostPark free, buildings ticketed
Best atLate afternoon
TipEnter through Ishikawa-mon from Kenrokuen, not from the station side
Higashi Chaya is the largest and the best preserved of Kanazawa's three teahouse districts, laid out in 1820 on the far bank of the Asano River, and it is not a reconstruction: geisha still work here. Two of the chaya open their upper floors to visitors, Shima and Kaikaro, and the upstairs rooms are the point, because the entertaining happened above street level behind those fine wooden lattices. The district is also where the gold leaf shops cluster, which makes the ground floors busier than the architecture deserves. Arrive before ten and the street is empty enough to photograph.
Time2 hr
CostFree to walk
Best atBefore 10am
TipPay to go upstairs at one teahouse; the street alone only tells you half of it
Circle the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art
Museum· Hirosaka, Kanazawa
SANAA, the practice of Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, opened this in October 2004 as a glass circle with no front and no back, which won the Golden Lion at that year's Venice Architecture Biennale and helped carry the pair to the Pritzker in 2010. The outer ring is free and open like a park; the galleries in the middle are ticketed. The work everyone queues for is Leandro Erlich's The Swimming Pool, ten centimetres of water on a sheet of glass with an aquamarine room underneath, so visitors look down at people who appear to be submerged and then walk in and look back up. Buy the gallery ticket even if the temporary show is unfamiliar, because the permanent installations are built into the building.
Time2 hr
CostOuter ring free, galleries ticketed
Best atWeekday morning
TipThe pool interior needs the gallery ticket; the view from above does not
Omicho has fed the city for roughly three hundred years and it still works as a market first, which is why the fish is better than the setting. The order is kaisendon, a lacquer bowl of rice under sashimi, roe and shellfish cut that morning, and it costs a fraction of what the same bowl costs in Tokyo. Winter is the season worth planning around: snow crab lands from November, and the small kobako-gani, the female crab sold whole with its roe, is the local order rather than the showpiece male. Stalls keep their own hours and most of the market closes for the New Year period.
Time1 hr
CostFree to enter
Best atLate morning
TipSkip the first counter you see at the entrance and walk to the back arcades
Nagamachi is where the middle-ranking retainers lived, and the shape of it survives: earthen walls under wooden capping, narrow lanes that bend to break a charge, and the oldest of the city's water channels still running through them. The Nomura residence is the one to enter. Eleven generations of a family in direct service to the Maeda lived here, and the garden they left is a compressed Kobori Enshu design with a stream fed from that canal, a waterfall, a granite slab bridge and a bayberry said to be four hundred years old. The Journal of Japanese Gardening once ranked it third in the country, and it is perhaps twenty paces across.
Time1 hr
CostDistrict free, house ticketed
Best atMorning
TipThe upstairs tea room over the garden is worth the extra few minutes
The nickname is wrong and the building is remarkable anyway. Myoryuji was founded in 1643 as part of a line of temples the Maeda placed on the city's edges, and because the shogunate limited what a domain could fortify, its defences were built inside a temple: a well shaft with a side passage, a staircase concealed behind paper, a lookout tower disguised as a roof, and floors that read as two from outside and are four in fact. Nothing here has any connection to ninja. Visits run as guided tours in Japanese on a timed schedule, and the rooms are too tight to wander alone, so book ahead and bring the English printout they hand out at the door.
Time45 min
CostTicketed
Best atEarly afternoon
TipTours are guided and timed, so reserve before you travel rather than at the gate
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki was born in Kanazawa in 1870 and spent his life explaining Zen to readers who had no Japanese, which is most of the reason the word is in English at all. The museum built for him by Yoshio Taniguchi has almost nothing in it: three low pavilions, a corridor, a small room of manuscripts, and a shallow black basin called the Water Mirror Garden that ripples at intervals and then goes still. The contemplative space at the end has no exhibit and no explanation, which is the exhibit. Twenty minutes is enough to see it and entirely misses the point.
Time1 hr
CostTicketed
Best atWeekday afternoon
TipSit in the contemplative space until the basin ripples again; the interval is the design
The third chaya district is the one most visitors miss, a single run of latticed teahouses pressed between the Asano River and a wall of stone steps, reached through an alley barely wide enough for two people. It is a designated preservation district like Higashi Chaya and about a tenth as busy. There is nothing to enter and nothing to buy, which is the appeal: at dusk the lanterns come on, the river carries the sound of the water down the whole length of it, and the shamisen practice from an upstairs room is not staged for anyone.
Time30 min
CostFree
Best atDusk
TipReach it from the Naka-no-hashi footbridge, not from the main road
The shrine was built in 1873, once the law changed to allow one dedicated to somebody other than a shogun, and it honours Maeda Toshiie (1537 to 1599) and his wife Matsu (1547 to 1617). The reason to walk up is the Shinmon gate, which a Dutch architect designed and which nobody would guess belongs to a Shinto shrine: a Japanese and Chinese ground floor carrying two upper storeys of coloured stained glass that once worked as a lighthouse, visible from the harbour. The garden behind it is older than the shrine, laid out as part of the Maeda estate, and almost nobody walks through to it.
Time30 min
CostFree
Best atAfter dark
TipThe stained glass is lit at night, which is when the gate makes sense
Two. The first covers Kenrokuen, the castle park and the 21st Century Museum, all within a few minutes of each other; the second covers Omicho, Nagamachi and the chaya districts across the Asano River. One day is enough only if you accept seeing the garden and skipping the teahouses.
Is Kanazawa worth stopping at between Tokyo and Kyoto?+
Yes, and the Shinkansen makes it easy: about two and a half hours from Tokyo, and one change to reach Kyoto since the line reached Tsuruga in 2024. Kanazawa gives you what people go to Kyoto for, teahouse streets, gardens and craft, at a fraction of the crowd.
What is the best time of year to visit Kanazawa?+
April for blossom in the garden and the castle park, May for the clearest weather, November for the maples and for the yukitsuri ropes going up. Winter is cold, grey and heavy with snow, which is also when the crab is in and when Kenrokuen looks like the photographs.
Do you need a car in Kanazawa?+
Not in the city. The loop bus links the station, Omicho, the castle, Kenrokuen and Higashi Chaya every 15 to 20 minutes, and the old centre is flat enough to walk or cycle. A car earns its keep only for the Noto Peninsula, where public transport is thin.
Can you day trip to Shirakawa-go from Kanazawa?+
Yes. Express buses run direct from Kanazawa Station and take about an hour and a quarter, with Gokayama about an hour away on the same corridor. Book the seat in advance in high season, and check the last departure back before you settle in for lunch.
Where to eat
Best restaurants in Kanazawa
Five kitchens, from two Michelin stars to the counter that owns the local dish.
Shinichiro and Jiro Takagi buy at the market each morning and build the courses around what came in, which is why the menu is never handed to you in advance. Two Michelin stars, and the room where most people first understand what Kaga cooking is.
A counter built on Hokuriku fish, a dashi drawn over forty hours and whatever Kaga vegetable is in season. Two Michelin stars and a handful of seats, so it books out further ahead than anywhere else in the city.
The Sea of Japan meets two currents off this coast, which is the whole argument for eating sushi in Kanazawa rather than saving it for Tokyo. Otome is the address locals name first, and it held two stars in the Michelin Guide Hokuriku.
Jibuni is Kanazawa's own dish and Ishiya is the name attached to it, to the point that locals use the two interchangeably. Order it and nothing else on your first night.
Inside the station building, which sounds like a compromise and is not: the Kaga set covers jibuni and the local seafood in one sitting, and it is the fix for an early Shinkansen or a late arrival.
The oldest brewery in Kanazawa, brewing junmai only, on rice and the groundwater under the city. The cellar can be visited year round, and the brewing floor itself during the October to April season. There is a bar attached, which is the easy version.
A brewery inside the teahouse district, in a building registered as a cultural property. The house style is light enough that it turns up at tea ceremonies, which tells you most of what you need to know about it.
Kanazawa drinks along the Sai River. The pattern repeats down the side streets: a counter for eight, a glass-fronted fridge holding whatever the owner rates this month, and Ishikawa labels like Tedorigawa poured by the glass rather than the bottle.
The SANAA circle, open on every side, with a free outer ring and ticketed galleries at the core. Erlich's pool is permanent; the temporary programme is what makes a second visit worth it.
The craft wing of the National Museum of Modern Art left Tokyo for Kanazawa in 2020, which is a fair measure of how seriously this city is taken on the subject. Housed in two restored army buildings above Kenrokuen.
The prefecture's own collection, strongest on Kutani porcelain and the decorative arts the domain paid for. Its centrepiece is Nonomura Ninsei's pheasant-shaped incense burner, a designated National Treasure.
Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts
36 designated crafts
All thirty-six crafts the prefecture designates, in one room each: Wajima lacquer, Kutani porcelain, Kaga Yuzen silk, gold leaf, inlaid metal. Its west door opens straight into Kenrokuen, so pair the two.
The city museum on the craft that made it, moved to Higashiyama in 2010. It shows the tools and the beating process rather than the finished souvenirs, which is the part the shops leave out.
A sake brewer's private collection of tea ware, given to the city and shown in rotation. Small, quiet and the best place to see what the Maeda taste actually looked like in the hand.
The circuit garden the Maeda built over almost two centuries, and one of the three great gardens of Japan. Different in every season, and genuinely different in snow.
A hillside pond garden inside Kanazawa Castle Park, reconstructed from excavation and old drawings on the site of the lords' private garden. Free, and almost empty compared with Kenrokuen across the road.
A private garden on a steep slope, built in tiers so the whole thing reads from the tea room at the bottom. Moss, maples and a scale that makes Kenrokuen feel municipal.
Perhaps twenty paces across, with a stream from the city's oldest canal, a waterfall, a granite bridge and a four-hundred-year-old bayberry. Once ranked third in the country by the Journal of Japanese Gardening.
A storehouse at the south end of the teahouse district with every wall, ceiling and floor finished in gold leaf. Free to walk into, and the fastest way to understand what the material does to light.
The shop behind the gold leaf soft serve, where a whole sheet is lifted with bamboo chopsticks and laid on the cone. It also runs the leaf-pasting sessions where you decorate a small box or a pair of chopsticks.
Kaga Yuzen is hand-painted silk in five traditional colours, and the centre walks the process through from sketch to finished bolt with artisans colouring in front of you. Hands-on sessions run by reservation.
The city runs studios on the hill above Higashi Chaya where young makers train in ceramics, lacquer, dyeing, glass and metal. You can watch them work, which is a different experience from a visitor workshop.
The most photographed streets in the city and the busiest between ten and four. Stay here and you get them at either end of the day, which is when they are worth having. Little to eat late.
One lane of latticed fronts between the river and a stone stair, with a handful of ryokan in it. Quiet to the point of feeling private, and five minutes on foot from Higashi Chaya.
Earthen walls, running water channels and preserved houses, immediately behind the main shopping district. Central without being loud, and the shortest walk to Kenrokuen and the castle.
Where the city goes out. Korinbo is the department stores and the shopping arcade; Katamachi behind it is the bars and the counters, and the only part of Kanazawa with any real noise after ten.
The station side is hotels, the Tsuzumi-mon gate and the glass Motenashi Dome, and it is the practical choice if you are moving on quickly. Nishi Chaya, the smallest teahouse district, sits south of it and takes almost no visitors.
Steep thatched gassho-zukuri farmhouses in a valley that spent most of its history cut off by snow, listed by UNESCO in 1995. Direct express buses run from Kanazawa Station and the last one back leaves earlier than you expect.
The other half of the same World Heritage listing, over the prefecture line and far quieter. Two hamlets, Ainokura and Suganuma, and a tradition of washi paper and folk song that Shirakawa-go's crowds never reach.
Four hot spring villages south of the city, Yamashiro, Yamanaka, Katayamazu and Awazu, with public bathhouses you can use without staying the night. Yamanaka pairs its bath with a gorge walk along the Kakusenkei.
One of the two head temples of Soto Zen, founded by Dogen in 1244 and still a working training monastery for around 150 monks. Seventy buildings on a cedar hillside, connected by covered stairs.
The preserved merchant streets of Sanmachi and a morning market, reachable on the same bus corridor as Shirakawa-go. Doable as a long day from Kanazawa, better as an overnight if you are heading south afterwards.
The coastline north of the city, with the Senmaida rice terraces and the lacquer town of Wajima. Recovery from the 2024 earthquake is uneven and varies by road, town and business, so check what is open before you plan a route rather than trusting an older itinerary.
Time your visit around the garden's seasons and the June festival.
Apr
Cherry blossom at Kenrokuen and the castle
Ishikawa blossoms a little after Tokyo, usually in early April. The garden and the castle park hold several hundred trees between them, and the paths run late into the evening while it lasts.
Jun
Kanazawa Hyakumangoku Matsuri
The city's biggest festival, three days over the first weekend in June, marking Maeda Toshiie's entry into Kanazawa Castle in 1583. The four-hour parade on the Saturday afternoon carries lion dancers, the Kaga firefighters' ladder acrobatics and a column of armoured retainers.
Jun
Kaga Yuzen Toro Nagashi
On the Friday night before the festival opens, thousands of candle lanterns made from paper and Kaga Yuzen silk are floated down the Asano River and under the Asanogawa Ohashi bridge. It began in 1975 to honour the dyers, and it is free to watch from the banks.
Jun
Hyakumangoku Cha-kai
Tea sittings held during the festival weekend at the tea houses around Kenrokuen, which is the one time of year the city's tea culture is on public offer rather than behind an introduction.
Jul
Asanogawa Kawadoko
Dining platforms go up along the Asano River from late July into early August, an idea borrowed from Kyoto and scaled to a smaller river. Reserved through the participating restaurants.
Oct
Autumn illuminations at the castle and Kenrokuen
The garden and the castle park are lit after dark from late October through November, timed to the maples. It is a different garden at night and the queues are shorter than in blossom season.
Nov
Yukitsuri goes up
From 1 November the gardeners begin rigging the rope cones that hold Kenrokuen's branches against the snow, tree by tree over several weeks. Watching the crews work the Karasaki pine is its own event.
Nov
Snow crab season
The Sea of Japan crab season opens in November and runs into March, and it reshapes every menu in the city. At Omicho the local order is kobako-gani, the smaller female crab served whole with its roe.
Getting around
Kanazawa transport & airports
How to arrive from Tokyo, and how to cross the city once you have.
KMQ
Komatsu Airport
The region's airport, about 40 minutes from Kanazawa Station by the airport bus to the west gate. Domestic flights mostly, with Tokyo Haneda the busiest route, so for most visitors the train beats it door to door.
Kanazawa joined the network when the Nagano extension opened on 14 March 2015, putting Tokyo about two and a half hours away. The line was extended south to Tsuruga in March 2024, which shortened the run from Kyoto and Osaka to one change.
Two loops, left and right, running every 15 to 20 minutes between the station, Omicho, the castle, Kenrokuen and Higashi Chaya. It is the single piece of transport most visitors need, and a day pass pays for itself in four rides.
The old city is compact and flat, and Machi-nori docking stations sit at most of the sights, so a bicycle covers the gaps the loop bus leaves. Rain is the catch: Kanazawa gets a lot of it, in every season.
What the Sea of Japan and the Kaga kitchen put on the table.
Jibuni
Duck dusted in flour and simmered with sudare-fu wheat gluten and vegetables until the coating thickens the broth, finished with a dab of wasabi. Kanazawa's own dish and the one to order first.
Kaisendon
The market bowl: rice under sashimi, roe and shellfish landed that morning. Omicho does it for a fraction of what the same bowl costs in Tokyo, which is most of the reason to eat breakfast there.
Nodoguro
Blackthroat seaperch, fat enough that people compare it to toro. Grilled with salt, as sushi, or over rice in the hitsumabushi style. The most expensive thing on most Kanazawa menus, and worth it once.
Kano-gani and kobako-gani
The Sea of Japan snow crab, in season from November to March. The big male is the showpiece; the small female kobako-gani, served whole with its roe, is what locals actually order.
Kaburazushi
A winter ferment rather than sushi: yellowtail sashimi and julienned carrot layered between slices of kabura turnip and left to work with koji rice. Sharp, crunchy and built for sake.
Kaga vegetables
A certified list of local varieties that turns over through the year, from spring bamboo shoots to Kaga lotus root in autumn and the big sweet Gensuke daikon in winter. Ask which one is in and order it.
Wagashi
Kanazawa is named alongside Kyoto and Matsue as one of Japan's three great cities for sweets, a legacy of the tea culture the Maeda paid for. Eat them where they are meant to be eaten, with matcha, in a garden tea house.
Gold leaf soft serve
A whole sheet of gold leaf lifted with bamboo chopsticks and laid over an ice cream. It is a photograph rather than a flavour, and it is also the most honest souvenir of a city that makes almost all of Japan's leaf.
Kanazawa fact sheet
Kanazawa at a glance
The essentials worth knowing before you go.
Country
Japan
Region
Ishikawa Prefecture, Hokuriku
Population
About 460,000 (city, 2025)
Founded
Kanazawa Gobo temple settlement, 1546; Maeda seat from 1583
Nickname
Hyakumangoku, the million-koku city
Language
Japanese
Currency
Japanese yen (¥)
Time zone
JST (UTC+9)
Calling code
+81 76
Airports
Komatsu (KMQ), Noto Satoyama (NTQ)
Power
100V, type A
Emergency
110 police, 119 fire and ambulance
Interesting facts
Kanazawa beats about 99% of Japan's gold leaf, and all of its silver and platinum leaf. The damp Hokuriku air that makes the winter miserable is exactly what lets the beaters work a sheet down to roughly a ten-thousandth of a millimetre without it tearing.
The city was never bombed in the Second World War, which is why three chaya districts and a samurai quarter are still standing rather than reconstructed. It is the reason Kanazawa looks older than cities that are older.
Leandro Erlich's The Swimming Pool at the 21st Century Museum holds ten centimetres of water on a sheet of glass. The people who appear to be underwater have walked into an aquamarine room beneath it, and half the experience is being on the wrong side of the illusion.
Roughly 2,180mm of rain falls on Kanazawa in a year, among the highest of any Japanese city. The local advice is that you can forget your lunch but not your umbrella, which locals repeat because it is true rather than because it is charming.
The Maeda were assessed at more than a million koku of rice, the richest daimyo house outside the Tokugawa themselves. Rather than arm, they patronised: the domain kept its own workshops for lacquer, silk dyeing and metal inlay, and those crafts are still the city's economy.
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