Warning: There is sexually explicit material in this post!

After my Friday night in Kanazawa, I required caffeine. I found an excellent little cafe on my way to the castle.

The proprietor had a library for guests to peruse, including a whole section of Edo period pornography. Samurai and geisha getting freaky is the tamest of the available subgenres. A little artful retro porn and great coffee, a perfect pairing. Happy valentines day! At the castle, I decided to have some fun with the abundance of snow on the ground, and started throwing snowballs at a tree, for target practice. You know, like normal thing to do when visiting a national treasure. A woman in a orange jacket I had walked by earlier approached me. I dropped the snow and turned to face her.

“Uh, excuse me. I’m working on developing a new tour and I wonder if you’d mind letting me take you on a tour of the castle, and also the adjoining gardens?”

Relieved that I wasn’t in trouble, I gladly accepted. She said that the way I had said “konnichiwa” to her earlier was very friendly, and that’s what prompted her to approach me. I had assumed she was a tour guide waiting on a group reservation, and she had seemed busy with her clipboard.

I’m not going to regurgitate what is probably already on Wikipedia. A couple of points I found interesting: The local clan was very wealthy because of the abundance of productive rice fields, and so, in the 17th century, they used it to build themselves a splendid little garden. This garden was not open to the public until the 1950’s. The lord of the clan was very particular about the sound of water in the garden. The clever gardeners figured out how to create four distinct sounds of water that can be enjoyed in their own area of the park. Can you guess what those four sounds are?

Plum blossoms There is a cohesive design to the castle and gardens with an eye towards security. Water was diverted from a river into an artificial pond on top of a hill in the garden. If the castle was under siege, a plug would be pulled. That would drain the water from this lake and fill up the moats around the castle. There were also turrets in the castle that had a facade making them blend in to the rest of the wall from the outside. Lots of other clever stuff like that…

After the tour of the castle and gardens, she took me on a lightning tour of Omicho market. I grabbed some incredibly fresh sushi. I’ll never be able to enjoy grocery store sushi in the States again, now that I’ve had Kanazawa grocery store sushi.

The crabs accurate capture how I felt. I went back to my guesthouse and passed out.