By Todd Mitchell
Kanazawa, Japan, Buffalo’s sister city there, is a former castle
town founded over 400 years ago. I recently spent a week there. Despite being
half a world apart, Kanazawa and Buffalo share many similarities. Both are
mid-sized cities, and we both are proud of our respective nature, history, and
culture.
The Maeda family ruled the Kanazawa region for just over 250
years. The head of the family, Toshiie, seemed to have a knack for picking the
winning side in Japan’s long series of wars that finally unified the country in
1600 under the Tokugawa family. As a reward, Toshiie was granted the richest
land holding in Japan, outside of the ruling family. This was the Kaga region
on the western coast of Japan, which today includes the Ishikawa, Toyama, and
Fukui prefectures. The Maedas were so rich, they were said to be worth over
1,000,000 koku a year, a measurement of rice, the basic unit of income at the
time. The next largest holding was worth only 770,000 koku, and down it went
from there.
Toshiie located his capital in Kanazawa. Lying between two
rivers and atop a low hill the castle was built according to good feng shui and
strategic principles. A temple district was established to the northeast to
protect the city from that unlucky direction. The Maeda’s samurai retainers
were told to live next to the castle, providing an additional line of defense,
and the rest of the city was laid out in districts according to profession.
(A street in the Samurai District)
Finally, two entertainment districts were permitted to develop,
one in the east and one in the west. Both are now preservation districts today;
walking the streets and visiting the shops and museums that are housed in the
former tea shops, one can imagine merchants and samurai patronizing the
pleasure quarters, and the sound of shamisen music and loud laughter coming
from second floor windows. One may still occasionally catch a glimpse of an
actual geisha as she arrives at a restaurant to entertain with music and witty
banter some well healed guests.
(The Higashi Chaya Entertainment District)
During the next 250 or so years of feudal rule, a central
problem for the ruling class was that income was agriculturally based.
According to the governing ideology, the only proper economic pursuit was
agriculture, and trade was to be despised, putting merchants at the bottom of
the social pyramid. As a consequence, while merchants followed their detested
business and got rich, the samurai faced an economic crisis as their numbers
and economic desires grew exponentially, while agricultural output rose only
slowly. Many samurai and lords sunk into poverty and debt, but the Maeda family
was too smart for that. Bucking the ideological leanings of their peers, the
Maeda’s encouraged and protected crafts and other industries. Kanazawa became a
center of silk weaving and dying, and many crafts associated with the Japanese
tea ceremony including ceramics and confectionaries. Gold and silver leaf work
was by law permitted only in the Tokugawa family controlled cities of Tokyo and
Kyoto, yet the trade flourished in Kanazawa, albeit secretly. The central
government certainly knew of this flouting of its regulations, but given the
power of the Maeda family, more than likely decided that don’t-ask-don’t-tell
was the wisest response. With its location near the Japan Sea, Kanazawa was
also a center of salt production and active trade with the northern island of
Hokkaido.
It was during this time that the Maeda family constructed
Kenrokuen Garden, today one of the three most famous in Japan. It is a
strolling garden, and at a little over 25 acres in size, there is plenty of
room to escape the pressures of the workaday world, even for a samurai lord.
Strolling gardens were at their peak during the Edo period (1603-1868), when
the aristocracy and feudal lords constructed them. Kenrokuen is open year
round, and each season has its own beauty. Perhaps its most well known feature is Kotoji-toro, a stone
lantern with two legs, said to resemble the bridge on a Japanese koto. It is an
icon of both the garden and Kanazawa. One may notice the resemblance to the
stone lantern in Buffalo’s own Japanese Garden. That is no coincidence; the
Japanese Garden in Delaware Park is a gift from Kanazawa to Buffalo.
Unfortunately for Kanazawa, the Maeda family was a little too
slow to back the winning side during the overthrow of the Shogun’s government,
and so was excluded from the new government. Things got even worse with Japan’s
determined Westernization over the next several decades, and the traditional
crafts and industries that had made the city so wealthy now lost their market.
This was the time when Westerners such as Frank Lloyd Wright were able to scoop
up thousands of Japanese wood block prints for a song because the Japanese
themselves regarded these prints as vulgar. Kanazawa experienced a severe
industrial downturn, and became a bit of a backwater.
Because the Americans recognized the value of its cultural
heritage, Kanazawa (and Kyoto) was spared the intense American fire bombing
that left, for example, 100,000 dead in Tokyo in just one night’s raid. Largely
because of this, Kanazawa is today the best-preserved castle town in Japan.
Kanazawa has leveraged this cultural heritage to rebuild its prosperity, and is
today a living center of Japanese arts and crafts, drawing tourists from around
Japan and the world. In fact, just this past June Kanazawa was named a City of
Crafts and Folk Arts by UNESCO.
You can experience a taste of Kanazawa this Thursday, September
17 at “Celebration of the Japanese Garden” fundraising event at Marcy Casino in
Delaware Park. At 4:30 and 6:00 you can join a walking tour of the garden, and
in the casino you can enjoy a display of ikebana, a spot of Japanese tea, and a
slide show on Kanazawa. All proceeds will go to benefit the projects of the
Friends of the Japanese Garden of Buffalo. Their upcoming project is to fund
traineeships for two Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy staff to learn about
Japanese Gardening in Japan in October 2009. The Olmsted gardeners will meet Japanese colleagues for an
intercultural exchange and bring their experience back to Buffalo’s Japanese
Garden. Suggested donation is $15. For more information, call 716.830.8267 or email here.