Kanazawa Part 2
My second day started out with a walk through the Nagamachi samurai district and the Omicho fish market but both were pretty much deserted and many shops and stalls were closed. While I didn’t feel the lack of tourists really the day earlier at Kenrokuen, here it was all too obvious that the place is a tourist town and that there is now a lack of them. There had been not too many people in Kenrokuen but a few had been around and I had perceived that as an advantage, but in the samurai house district and the fish market the disadvantage became truly obvious. Luckily there is still some local tourism in Japan. I cannot even imagine what e.g. Angkor Wat is looking like now, since Cambodian people have in general not enough money for tourism. Siem Reap must be so sad now and all the locals who depend on tourism for their livelihood are out of jobs and probably struggling to survive.
I wandered all the way to the Higashi Chaya tea house district, and at least there were a few people again and a few shops were open. I had an excellent Yuzu (a Japanese lemon variety, very tasty!) shaved ice in one of the open cafes and cooled off a bit thanks to it. The heat that day was pretty insane.
Giving in to the heat, I rode with a bus back to Kenrokuen and the museums around it and visited the Ishikawa Prefectural Art museum. They have a standard exhibition of pottery, lacquer ware and paintings, but they also had a special exhibition going on of a local artist called Rei Kamoi (never heard of him before). He lived in Paris and Spain for a while it seems. His paintings are mostly portraits of elder people, most of them pretty dark and close to depressive. He did not vary his style very much, all those people have their mouths open in some form and their eyes are just holes. He also painted churches, cubic things without resemblance to real churches. It was interesting, but didn’t knock my socks off. I wondered around a bit outside again to two shrines, then made a stop at the very minimalist D. T. Suzuki Museum. He was a Buddhist philosopher who introduced Zen Buddhism to the rest of the world. The museum is tiny, but has great architecture stressing clarity of thought in its minimalist style.
