Some Lessons from a Sister City

This is the second installment in a series on Kanazawa, Japan, Buffalo's sister city, by Todd Mitchell.

Despite Kanazawa being half a world away, as a traveler, I found Buffalo shares many similarities with this former castle town. I spent about a week last summer in our sister city in Japan. Both cities are mid-sized cities, and we are rightly proud of our respective nature, history, and culture. Furthermore, both cities have experienced severe industrial downturns, Kanazawa about 100 years ago, and Buffalo starting back a couple of decades. Finally, the citizens of Buffalo have turned to their cultural heritage as a key to the community's revitalization. Kanazawa did this decades ago, and it is today a bustling city with a vital arts and crafts industry and tourists visiting from all over Japan and the world. Now, this is where Kanazawa has a critical lesson to teach us Buffalonians. The Kanazawa city government has done so much more to develop and leverage its culture and history than have any of our local governments. (It should be noted here that because Kanazawa is a metropolitan government, it is more equivalent to Erie County than the city of Buffalo.) And this support has really paid off.

Kanazawa is a wonderful place to visit. Tourists can visit the castle and samurai district, watch silk being dyed and gold leaf worked, and stroll through Kenrokuen Garden, one of the three most famous in Japan. The whole city is criss-crossed with canals, built during the feudal period to bring water to the castle and garden. The sound of flowing water fills so many parts of the city. There is a shamisen shop where one can try playing the three-stringed, guitar like instrument. Kanazawa is not simply a tourist destination where one visits museums and admires from a distance. It is a place for a pleasant stroll, a stop to sample something delectable in a 250 year old sweets shop, or a chance to try one's hand at a traditional Japanese craft.

As discussed in a previous posting, the Maeda family, which made Kanazawa the capitol of their domain, encouraged and protected crafts and other industries as an economic strategy. As a result, Kanazawa is still today a center of gold and silver leafwork, ceramic production, silk weaving and dying, sake brewing, and many other crafts. Other arts flourish in Kanazawa including the Noh theater, Japanese tea ceremony, and gardening.

Kanazawa's cultural scene is by no means solely traditional and historic. The best example is the 21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, which opened in 2004. It is an extraordinary design, an open circle of glass with rooms of differing size and shape at irregular intervals. The visitor is left unsure whether inside or outside, or where in the museum he is. He wanders, encountering a new work of art after turning a corner, passing through a doorway and stops, staring at the sky through a square opening in the ceiling. The art is strictly contemporary; there are no works dated prior to 1980. The museum had over 300,000 visitors in the first two years.

21^st Century Museum of Contemporary Art 

The current mayor, Tomotsu Yamade, really pushed hard for this project. He hired the first museum director, Yutake Mino, and then appointed Mino deputy mayor so he would have an absolutely free hand in developing the museum and its programming. Mino took full advantage of his opportunity. He decided to focus on the elementary age, particularly the fourth grade. Why this age and not older? Mino firmly believes that at this age, a child's mind is still open and receptive to beauty. It is not yet contaminated with the ugliness of the world, nor is it distracted by the early stages of puberty. The director credits this policy with the extraordinary attendance figures the new museum has garnered.

Mayor Tomotsu Yamade (center) with Todd and Atsuko Mitchell

At first glance, a glass and steel contemporary art museum within the shadow of the feudal castle may seem a great contradiction. Who could imagine this juxtaposing of traditional and modern? However, the avant-garde actually is an old tradition in Kanazawa. Maeda Toshiie was a true groundbreaker when, back in the seventeenth century, he officially supported the most current and successful arts and crafts then to be found in Japan. Viewed from this perspective, Mayor Yamade is merely continuing the enlightened economic policies of 400 years. I term them economic policies rather than cultural policies because that reflects the role of the arts and culture in Kanazawa. The Maedas saw culture as an engine of economic development, not the other way around. In short, a healthy cultural scene will lead to a healthy economic environment. But at the same time, arts and culture need public support. We happily lavish millions of public dollars on our sports teams, but dole out money to the arts in dribs and drabs.

"Build it and they will come" is rather limited as a tourism development strategy. Therefore, Kanazawa has done just about everything to market itself and develop its tourism infrastructure. After even just a day or two there, it is impossible to not note a simple fact; Kanazawa is a very tourist friendly city.

As soon as I arrived in the Kanazawa train station, I was greeted by a large, attractive tourist information center. I picked up maps and city guides, all in English, that enabled me to plan my whole visit. When I had any questions, the bilingual staff helped me out.

On exiting the station, I boarded a reasonably priced shuttle bus that took me right to all of the attractions. Whenever I got off and started to walk, clear uniform signage was everywhere, showing the way and interpreting sites. By the way, those signs were in Japanese, English, Chinese, and Korean.

Any place I visited, whether a major gallery or a small samurai house, had a pamphlet in English. I could not have asked for an easier or more welcoming experience. All of this infrastructure was funded by the city government. Also, like Buffalonians, the citizens of Kanazawa will always stop to help a confused visitor find his way.

Buffalo has such a vital cultural scene, with national level galleries, theater, music, and architecture. However, it sometimes seems our institutions limp from funding crisis to funding crisis; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery recently had to close Wednesdays, so it is open now only four days a week. The Historical Society and the Science Museum are chronically underfunded. Many institutions such as Squeaky Wheel, Hallwalls, and CEPA Gallery, nationally recognized in the avante-garde art world, are little known in their own community. Buffalo was once one of the most exciting centers in the world of modern literature, music, and art in the 1960s and early 1970s. There is no reason we could not be again, with the incredible legacy we have inherited and the energetic and creative folks that live in Buffalo. However, it is not going to be possible without steady, predictable, and substantial government support. Kanazawa has made itself an international center of art and culture; its success was evidenced just this past June when Kanazawa was named a City of Crafts and Folk Arts by UNESCO. The only critical ingredient for success which Buffalo does not share is the level of commitment the government of Kanazawa has made to its arts and culture.

Buffalo is also enjoying much success in branding itself an arts and cultural tourism destination. A recent study conducted for the Convention and Visitors Bureau (CVB) by ArtsMarket, a tourism consulting firm, found that more and more travelers are coming to Buffalo for the cultural scene and architecture. The CVB is rolling out some really interesting marketing campaigns, and the recently announced 18% increase in county funding is more than welcome. Hopefully, that funding will continue to increase; Buffalo still spends far less on marketing than does Rochester, and it is not like New York State is investing very much in advertising.

What Buffalo is most sorely lacking is an adequate tourism infrastructure. Visitors need to be able to get around; this means good maps, lots more signage, and some kind of shuttle. We need a single point of contact for potential visitors to get all the information they need, where to stay, how to get around, what to see and do, and where to eat. This point of contact must be one website, one pamphlet, and one human contact to call or visit. Any tourist also should be able to book a hotel, reserve a restaurant, and but a ticket for an art gallery or an architecture tour, all through that single point of contact. Finally, there are virtually no services available in Buffalo, whether a map or tour guide, in any language other than English.

Volunteers in our community are doing great work to meet some of these needs. The Darwin Martin House has over 400 volunteers, and travelers at the Buffalo Niagara International Airport are greeted by volunteers at an information counter. While I am frequently astonished at what non-profit groups accomplish in developing our tourism business, there is a limit to what volunteers can do. Only the government has the resources to coordinate all of these efforts and to build an adequate tourism infrastructure for Buffalo. Only the government has the resources to coordinate all of the efforts and to build an adequate tourism infrastructure for Buffalo. While it is gratifying that our government leaders have begun to tout tourism as one of our region's future industries, even with the recent increase in CVB funding, they have largely failed to provide the resources needed to make Buffalo a vibrant tourism city.

Kanazawa has built a vibrant, sustainable economy through arts, culture, and tourism. Government funding has been a critical part of fostering and growing these industries. Will Buffalo and Erie County take a lesson from all this?

Top image: The author tries the shamisen.