you might think that after our grueling hike up usui pass to karuizawa, we'd stay the night there. unfortunately, karuizawa is a hot resort destination for japanese tourists and staying there is pretty expensive, plus we had places to be, so we ended up staying the night at a different ka-zawa, kanazawa. "but wait, that is almost 300km away on the other side of two mountain ranges!" one quirk about travelling japan is that some places are much closer to each other temporally than they appear physically, thanks to the space distortion created by shinkansen linesit would be cool to see a travel time contour map of japan, you could probably use it to deduce the shinkansen route network. for example, though sendai is three times further away from tokyo than chōshi (360 km vs. 120 km), in terms of travel time sendai is significantly closer to tokyo (1h30m vs. 2h) because it's on a shinkansen line. both karuizawa and kanazawa are on the hokuriku shinkansen so it only takes about two hours on a laid-back evening train to get between them, if you pick the right service you don't even have to transferon the train we booked our hotel for the night, the smile hotel kanazawa. smile hotel is another budget business hotel chain, not quite as widespread as APA or toyoko inn, though i'd still managed to take notice of them because of their goofy logo:

for some reason i can't shake the notion in my head that their hotels should look like this: we had a great night at the smile hotel kanazawa, the building was brand new and felt way nicer than it should have been for a budget hotel, and the check out time was 11am instead of 10am like at most japanese hotels, that extra hour in the morning felt luxurious. i later tried to stay at a different smile hotel for the 11am checkout, but turns out it is not a company-wide policy...

the reason we chose to stay the night in kanazawa is because that was the next city we planned to visit. kanazawa, i had been informed, is a city rich in history, it's been called "the kyoto of the couple hours north of kyoto". like kyoto, so much of the city had been preserved because kanazawa escaped heavy bombing during the war, apparently they didn't bother attacking it because it had almost nothing worth targeting like military bases or heavy industry, for centuries kanazawa had mainly been a hub for delicate artisans, the local daimyo burned a lot of their vast wealth funding the arts to make themselves less of a threat to the shogun (the kaga domain was by far the richest one under the tokugawa shogunate). it's got a little bit of everything: a castle, historic samurai and teahouse districts, a ninja temple with hidden passages and anti-sneaky squeaky floors, and one of japan's renowned "three great gardens", the kenroku-en. the best part is that all of the sights are within easy walking distance of both each other and the central train station, no need to ride some crowded janky local bus around like you have to do in kyoto.

in the morning at 11am, we checked out of smile hotel and went to the station to deposit our bags in a coin locker. as is typical, almost all of them were full, luckily kanazawa station has THE MOST coin lockers i've ever seen at a station, probably well over 500, and going a bit out of our way outside the station's furthest south exit we were able to find a whole line of empty ones outside. then it was time to join the crowd walking down the big sidewalk along the main road towards all the sights, a bit jarring because suddenly we found ourselves among a bunch of other white dudes again, after not seeing any going up usui pass or in karuizawa. privately, i get a little frustrated with myself every time i see another white tourist in japan, to me it's an indication that wherever i'm visiting is not obscure enough. evidently kanazawa was not one of japan's best-kept secrets like i'd thought, at least the tourists were mostly european, it's only TRULY over in japan if you go somewhere and see americans there...

similar to many japanese castles, kanazawa castle was basically a huge park divided up by fortifications like rock walls, moats, and mounds. reconstruction work was well underway on the "main palace" building, all they have finished rebuilding otherwise is mostly walls and gatehouses. there were a lot of big grassy lawns around, apparently most of the grounds of the castle had been used as a college campus until relatively recently and that's where many of the buildings used to stand (before that, the castle had been used as a military base during the war, pretty appropriate). we decided to circle back to the castle later, walking through the park and over the bridge to the adjacent garden.

we hadn't eaten yet so before entering the garden we decided to look around for someplace to get a quick bite or at least some coffee, but finding a satisfactory establishment proved difficult. the problem with many japanese small businesses like local restaurants is that the opening hours/days are often based entirely on vibes, sometimes you'll show up at the door to some place to see a handwritten sign saying something like "Closed early today, I have a doctor's appointment". if you're lucky, they'll post about the closure online or give some advance warning by posting a calendar outside the store showing opening days for the month, sometimes looking like they've been chosen by randomly throwing darts at it. things are especially bad if it's the middle of some vague holiday season like we were apparently currently in, one promising place i saw on google maps we walked like ten minutes to get to had a sign posted outside saying they were temporarily closed for an entire MONTH.

eventually we found ourselves back near the garden and decided to just go in through a side entrance, but after ten minutes i called it off because i was feeling way too hungry to properly appreciate it, i was drooling watching the koi drift by underwater. the tickets were valid for reentry so we popped out the front entry and went into the closest coffee shop, a place i had rejected earlier for looking insufferably modern, pictures of it are definitely featured prominently in the portfolio of some hip design firm. their coffee was excellent of course (how annoying), but i'd snagged the very last sandwich so my friend split off to find something of his own to eat. after ten minutes, he sent me a message: "i found the PERFECT restaurant just around the block, i can't believe we missed this place." accompanying the message was a picture of a teishoku with a fish entree and like half a dozen little side dishes of pickles and simmered stuff, basically my ideal meal, so i threw back my coffee and immediately went to join him even though i'd already had a sandwich.

⊕average $5 lunch in japanit was an extremely legit local lunch joint miraculously open during the apparent holiday, one of those places open for only three hours a day and run by two old japanese ladies sustaining a steady stream of light conversation throughout the day. within minutes i had my own full tray with even an additional side dish my friend hadn't gotten, and then five minutes later the lady came out and gave me another one that couldn't even fit on the tree. she also demonstrated how to eat the fish by mixing together the soy sauce and shaved... uhhh white stuff, daikon? as we wrapped up, she popped by again and gave us a little dish of "dessert", though it wasn't anything fancy, just a big slice of banana. as we left, i praised her by saying that it was a bountiful teishoku, in the usual humble manner she replied "oh no, it was just a bunch of vegetables, simple country cooking..." then i tried to say that was fine by me because i really like pickles and simmered items, but i'm pretty sure i accidentally said i like pickles and fake things...

now that i could actually focus on it, the garden was splendid, they had lots of poles holding up spindly tree branches, artificial waterfalls, the oldest fountain in japan, and the famous stone lantern everyone was lining up to get pictures with. afterwards we went back over to the castle, trying to find the entrance of something inside it that we'd purchased a combo ticket with the garden for, but every single building we went into was free entry. we made it all the way to the top layer (3rd or maybe 4th) of the fortifications, a jungle overlooking the city that had apparently been the original site of the castle keep. when it burned down after 35 years, it was rebuilt on lower ground because everyone was sick of always having to walk all the way up there, and i like to imagine that ever since then (about 400 years ago) it's been the overgrown attic of kanazawa. the muffled sounds of some sort of commotion in a park down below wafted up to us there...

after an exhaustive search of the castle grounds, we finally found what we were looking for, an entrance hidden at the back of a long building cleverly disguised as part of the castle wall. i don't know, honestly i'm getting pretty sick of going inside japanese castles, it's always the same deal, you take off your shoes and go up treacherously steep narrow stairs that are effectively ladders in order to visit rooms that are either completely empty or filled with boring dusty museum exhibits, i really think they're best appreciated from outside. it would be nice if they did something more similar to what they do in europe, display interiors with period-appropriate furniture and décor so you can get a feel for what the space looked like back in the day, then again probably wouldn't be interesting either because the keeps of japanese castles weren't actually lived in, for long periods when there weren't active conflicts going on they were mostly used as storehouses. oh well...

leaving the castle after conducting a cursory walkthrough of the interior, we crossed a cool wooden bridge over a street and found ourselves at a shrine, thereby crossing off another item from the "historic japanese buildings to visit" list. it turned out to be the famous shrine with the unusual dutch-inspired entry gate, all the tourist sights in kanazawa really are right next to each other. but we didn't linger too long because by this point we were getting a little tired of history, no need to worry because kanazawa also contains the absolute cutting-edge over at the kanazawa 21st century museum of contemporary art, which we were trying to make our way over towards. one of the parks we passed seemed to be the source of the noise we'd heard earlier, we made note to check it out later, perhaps there was some kind of japanese autumn festival going on.

you can tell you've reached the 21st century museum of contemporary art when you start seeing strange objets d'art poking out of the grass around this big circular glass building, which on google maps from above looks like some kind of microprocessor chip. we went in through a random back door and for a second i thought we'd manage to sneak in, without checking anything they allowed us to go into an exhibition room with this surreal display of like 50 small speakers on stands in a circle, playing a haunting choral performance⊕ (it was pretty enthralling and we stayed in there for a bit). turns out it had been a free exhibition, and after walking around nearly half the circumference of the building we managed to find the front desk to buy tickets for entrance to the interior.

the most popular permanent exhibition at the museum is "the swimming pool", it looks like a normal swimming pool except there's only a small layer of water at the top and underneath it is actually a room people can go down to, creating this visual effect where it looks like fully-clothed museum visitors are casually walking around underwater at the bottom of the pool. you can look in from the top whenever you want, but going to the bottom of the pool requires reservations that fill up quickly. mostly the pool came off to me as just another gimmicky photo opportunity like you see so many of these days, if i was a bad boy conceptual artist i would make a piece that skewers that dynamic by being an absolutely irrestible photo op that's completely unphotographable, when you take a picture you discover the whole area is bathed in invisible rays or something that sabotage any attempt to take a picture, or perhaps the artwork would be placed inside an onsen or bathhouse where you can only view it while nude.

the other exhibits didn't leave much of an impression, besides this room that was dedicated to a "performance" of this strange movie projected across three of its walls. the whole room had been decorated with various props that were part of the experience, one wall had a bunch of cargo crates piled up and the center of the room had an arcane wooden Device moving rhythmically like a pumpjack. a bunch of different styles of seating were randomly scattered about the room, but i noticed that it was actually a carefully arranged random scattering, there were subtle markings on the floor indicating where they were supposed to go, if someone moved one of the chairs or stools staff members would come in afterwards and restore them to their correct random position. when we left through the gift shop, i saw that they had full lines of merch ready to go for the special exhibition we had just gone through, tote bags and postcards and t-shirts with the paintings printed on them, not so different from the pop-up stores in akiba...

finally, we stopped by the park to check out what all the commotion was, clearly some kind of big event was going on. it turns out it was an extremely authentic and traditional autumn festival...

⊕as you might expect of the japanese, they went quite hard with it, they had some of the most extravagant food stalls i've ever seen at an event like this, giving carnival booths a run for their money. there were about ~7 stands representing some very legit-looking german breweries, the kinds that have their own coats-of-arms saying "SEIT (since) 1050" (two of the breweries appearing there claimed to be the world's oldest). but besides a couple of amused tourists, there didn't seem to be a single german around, the workers in the booths were all japanese, i wonder how it's all arranged with the breweries behind the scenes. most of them weren't even particularly well-known breweries either, i hadn't heard of any of them besides hofbräu münchen (not like i'm an expert though).

it was around dinnertime, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and get dinner and drinks at the festival. at a table i saw that somebody had a flight of four beers and immediately decided i had to have one, it didn't narrow down the options by much because almost every stall offered one. the beer was on the expensive side for japan, though i suppose it was imported draft beer after all. there was plenty of food on offer too, mostly german drinking classics like pretzels or a wide variety of sausages, some japanese influence did sneak in with the option to get them covered in cheese or mayo, and there were japanese izakaya classics like karaage available too. a few booths offered some more substantial german fare like currywurst or schnitzel, since we were looking for a proper dinner we figured we'd try one of those. my friend opted for currywurst and i got some kind of schnitzel with tomato sauce, sauerkraut, and sausages:

i was really curious what the german food at japanese oktoberfest would be like, it was guaranteed to be either spectacular or a complete travesty. unfortunately, it ended up being the latter, my “schnitzels” (or should i call them shitzels) were hilariously pathetic and nothing like the picture, two limp reconstituted food service “edible”-grade patties that looked like they’d been reheated in a pot of hot water bare, with a dainty dollop of sauce that was probably half ketchup and half water. the beer was good at least, since it came direct from germany in the kegs piled up behind the stalls.

after the meal, we made our way over to the smoking tent because my friend wanted to have a dessert cigarette. in japan you often see smoking areas sponsored by tobacco companies trying to push new products, kanazawa oktoberfest was no exception and the smoking tent was sponsored by JT (japan tobacco) in order to shill their heated tobacco device called "ploom". observing japanese smokers throughout our trip, we had noticed that vaping is nearly non-existent, instead what's popular right now is smoking cigarettes half-embedded in these vape-like handheld electronic devices. at first my friend theorized that it was some kind of device to neutralizes the smoke that comes out of the end of a cigarette in order to make them less of a nuisance or something, but i looked it up and turns out it's something called "heated tobacco", sort of like a cyborg cigarette halfway between normal cigarettes and vaping. you load the devices with special mini-cigarettes which are then heated until they vaporize without actually combusting, ⊕so i guess you're basically vaping a cigarette. heated tobacco seems quite common in japan but i've never seen it anywhere else, it might be a modern example of a "galapagos syndrome" product.

when we went in to the tent, an eager ploom rep who was pretty good at english came over and chatted us up, i asked him if we could do a free trial and he said "certainly!" he grabbed two plooms from a table lined with them and guided us over to a different table where we could select our cigarette "cartridge" to load them with, it was fascinating to see the vast array of flavor options they had available because most of that has been banned in the US and europe for a while now. i chose a "blueberry" flavored one, inserted it into the mecha with the tip left poking out, then waited a couple seconds for the beep to indicated it was ready and heated. it felt pretty much like smoking something exactly halfway between a vape and a cigarette, vape flavor but coming out of something that looked like a cigarette...

since the beer at kanazawa oktoberfest had been proper, we decided we'd get one more for the road, putting down a thousand yen deposit to get it in the fancy glass mugs. shortly after we sat down at the tables in front of the stage, a genki japanese mc girl announced that it was time to start the authentic german music, and a group of elderly white guys clad in lederhosen took the stage. i have reason to believe that they were not actually german because they played no songs in german, mostly easy listening sing-along classics like "sweet caroline", and because of how out of context it was in every way it took me quite a while to recognize that their opening salvo was richi e povieri's "sarà perché ti amo", an italian song. but the beer was flowing and they did a good job leading a lot of group dances and activities, so a good time was had by all. before leaving, we went back for one final free ploom puff at the smoking tent, the sales rep happy to indulge us while confessing "you know guys, i can't honestly recommend that you actually buy one because there's no way you're finding cartridges for it in the US". i was also tipsy enough to speak japanese, astounding this gregarious japanese guy who'd come over to try and talk with the foreigners. at some point i announced to the entire smoking tent: 金沢オクトーバーフェスト大好き！！！