Japan's best-preserved Edo city — sea urchin and snow crab at Omicho Market, gold leaf everything, and geisha districts that never burned
Kanazawa is the capital of Ishikawa Prefecture on the Sea of Japan coast — Japan's best-preserved Edo-era city outside Kyoto, saved from both the Meiji-era industrialisation and Allied bombing in World War II. The city is built around Omicho Market, a covered market of 170+ stalls that has operated since the Edo period and is considered by Japanese food lovers as one of the finest seafood markets in the country. Kanazawa specialities: fresh buri (yellowtail), nodoguro (blackthroat seaperch), kano crab (snow crab specific to the Sea of Japan coast, in season November–March), fresh sea urchin f…
Kanazawa was the seat of the Maeda clan, the most powerful feudal lords outside the Tokugawa shogunate, who ruled Kaga Province from 1583 to 1869. Because the Maeda were wealthy enough to be feared but pragmatic enough not to be a military threat, the Tokugawa shogunate left them alone — and Kanazawa was never burned, sacked, or bombed. The result is the best-preserved Edo-era urban fabric in Japan: two intact geisha districts (Higashi Chaya and Kazuemachi), a samurai quarter (Nagamachi), and Kenroku-en garden, considered one of Japan's three canonical landscape gardens. The Maeda invested th…