Kanazawa, Japan, Nov. 7, 2023 — We’re nearing the end of our three days in Kanazawa, a place we will remember for its atmospheric samurai and geisha districts, for its busy seafood market and an unforgettable sushi dinner, for the hawks known as black kites that swooped and soared over the beautiful castle grounds, and, most of all, for the timeless beauty of the Kenrokuen Garden and its twisted, evocative trees.

It was during our quiet morning strolling the curved paths of Kenrokuen, considered one of Japan’s three greatest landscape gardens, the only sounds the splash of water and the distant thrum of the city, that I felt most connected to Kanazawa, and the most in love with the city. The name Kenrokuen literally means “Garden of the Six Sublimities,” referring to spaciousness, seclusion, artificiality, antiquity, abundant water, and broad views, which are said to be the six attributes that make up a perfect Japanese garden. They make for a really nice city, too.

It’s taken centuries of hard work to make Kenrokuen the incredible garden it is today. The spacious grounds used to be the outer garden of Kanazawa Castle and were constructed by the ruling Maeda family over a period of nearly two hundred years. Kenrokuen was opened to the public in 1871. One-hundred-and fifty-odd years later, around every corner there is something to experience, to see and feel: Ponds, streams, bridges, teahouses, flowers, stones, viewpoints, lanterns, and thousands of trees, many of them very old, very twisted trees with their limbs propped up with all kinds of supports, some of them hanging low over ponds and streams. Many of the trees, especially the expressive pines, struck us as individuals, old men and old women, who had seen and lived through so much history, and we even wondered whether the gardeners had named them.

We’ve been in other gardens, in Japan and elsewhere, where the hard work of caring for them seem deliberately hidden, where the gardeners seemed to keep out of sight, perhaps not to affect the experience of the visitors, or maybe to make the landscape seem more natural than it actually is. Not so at Kenrokuen, at least not during our visit. The grounds were busy with crews picking up pine needles, plucking leaves from shallow streams, and, most spectacularly, a group of men who leaned ladders all over one of those big, expressive pines, and climbed among the heavy branches, even perching on the tip top of a towering center pole, while installing the elaborate rope supports that give the long-limbed pines the strength they need to hold up the heavy snows that will arrive in Kanazawa in the coming months.

Over a couple hours of wandering Kenrokeun, we saw and felt and experienced every one of those many “sublimities,” the space and water and solitude, ancient stone paths, burbling creeks and quiet ponds, and on the edge of the garden, the broad views looking out across modern Kanazawa. We walked through a grove of plum trees, their last yellow leaves falling to the ground. We came up one path and discovered three wildlife photographers with two-foot-long telephoto lenses excitedly photographing something, we dared not interrupt them, the motor drives of their cameras firing away. We never saw what they were photographing.

It must have been another one of those beautiful sublimities.

Kanazawa, Japan, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023 – It’s hard to even begin to describe the incredible spectacle that greeted us to Kanazawa, a culture-rich city on the Sea of Japan, home to beautifully preserved wooden houses, atmospheric geisha quarters, and mysterious temples used as a wily samurai lord’s secret defense weapons. We expected to experience the history of a city built by the Maeda samurai clan back in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. But we did not expect to find the castle grounds, and its surviving stone defensive walls, turned into a rich and moving digital art display, in turns amusing, inspiring, creepy, and beautiful, sometimes all at once. TeamLab, whose installation we saw in Tokyo Sunday (apparently everyone from BTS, to the Kardashians, Justin Bieber and U2 have also visited), is a somewhat mysterious collective of artists who produce digital art installations around the world. But this temporary exhibit in Kanazawa was much more powerful than the tourist-filled Instagram crowd in Tokyo. Crowds of hundreds of young Kanazawans climbed up the steep paths to the castle, which overlooks the city, to see spaces transformed by the magic of sound and light.

The first installation was of a famous Zen calligraphy practice known as Enso, where a Buddhist practitioner paints a circular shape using an ink brush as a form of meditation. The spontaneous act of painting embodies complicated religious concepts of impermanence and imperfection and being and nothingness, enlightenment and eternity, but this particular ink drawing was the projection of a ink painting on the massive stone walls – the image changed, and morphed, turning into fantastical shapes, before disappearing – and then it would start again.

It’s hard to even describe what it was like to walk (sometimes stumble on the uneven surfaces in the dark) through the castle grounds, watching a row of trees lit up and humming with sound and color that changed as people walked by. There were strange ovoid shapes in a grove that would change colors and shape when you touched them. One stone corridor was filled with lines of marching creatures – frogs, and rabbits and humans wearing masks – in a very disturbing and vaguely martial procession. The images never repeat exactly, yet they repeat and repeat and repeat. Especially since they are projected on a castle’s walls, with its own violent history, they felt like a depressing reminder of how we humans can’t seem to break free of the cycle of violence.

But the piece de resistance was at the end, when massive images of creatures, from tigers to birds and various animals of indeterminate species – all made of flowers – cavorted on the stone walls of the castle. There was so much to love – the Enso was moving. The egg shapes in the forest were just delightful – everyone was breaking out laughing, and children were running wild, and the adults were also acting a little childlike. Japanese, American or European – the surprised and delighted laughter sounded exactly the same. The rabbit procession simply disturbed me, while the flower-tigers were gorgeous, if still a bit threatening. Though this is just a temporary display, I hope they make it permanent – ha, listen to me! Impermanence is the point… In any case, we loved it, and we love Kanazawa.

That was yesterday. Today we visited the famous Kenroku-en and the Myoryuji, or “Ninja Temple.” But those are stories for another day. Now, we have a omakase sushi dinner to get to….

Saturday, Nov. 4, 2023 – After 11 years and at least three canceled trips, we finally made it back to Japan yesterday. It felt like a real triumph just to step off the airplane at Haneda. Six and a half years ago, we had already checked into our flight to Tokyo when a doctor told me not to get on the plane because I had blood cancer. I never thought I would make it back to Japan, or anywhere, ever again. Then a stem-cell-transplant a few harrowing years later, we planned a second trip in March 2020 with Mitchell, Alex and Will – that was obviously abruptly canceled by the pandemic. We tried again in 2021, but Japan still hadn’t opened back up to the world. I was increasingly anxious in the days leading up to this trip, certain that something horrible was going to happen. At the Seattle airport, we were told there was problem with our flight – a volcano in Russia blowing its top and sending a huge plume of ash into the sky, cancelling all flights into Seoul and Shanghai. I thought once again we would be foiled, but our flight made it, via a 2-hour detour south, stretching our trip into more than 12 hours. We were so grateful to make it. “Tadaima” is what you call out when you return home – and your family calls back “Okaeri-nasai!” or welcome back. I feel so lucky to be here.

I will try to keep this short, since we are exhausted. Rick reminded me today how I pushed our friends Helen and Mike so hard on our first day in Tokyo 11 years ago that Helen actually cried because her feet hurt so bad. I still feel terrible about that, but Rick said I almost pushed him as far today! Not really, but it was a long day that started about 1:30 a.m. when Rick popped awake and never was able to go back to sleep. I think I woke up about 2:30 and called it a morning, fixed coffee and did laundry (no lines at that hour, conveniently the coin laundry was across the hall.) We are staying at a great hotel in Toyosu called the Matsui Garden Hotel Toyosu. Great design, absolutely phenomenal views from our 34rd floor room. It is small but perfect, and located very close to the new Toyosu wholesale seafood and produce market that replaced the old fish market at Tsukiji (more on that later). The hotel is also a short walk to the TeamLab Planets immersive digital art experience. (Elon Musk visited recently and loved it – it was also just named the leading attraction in Asia – yes, all of Asia.) We had no trouble making it to the tuna action at Toyosu Market at 5:30 a.m. We had won the lottery (only about 25 people a day win the lottery to get close to the daily tuna auction, where fish from all over the world are auctioned to the highest bidder and fish can go for over a hundred thousand dollars – per fish.)

From there, we got in line at the digital art experience a half hour before it opened at 9 a.m. Though there were probably three dozen people in front of us in line, somehow we managed to get our shoes and socks stored in the lockers before everyone else and were the first people in. It gets very crowded so we felt lucky. We first navigated a hellish room with an uneven surface of collapsing marshmallow fun-house pillows – I fell at least three times – and from there it got better. There was an insanely beautiful “infinity” piece, where thousands of LED lights created gorgeous and dizzying light shows all around us. The mirrored floors and ceilings heightened the effect. It felt like Kusama Yayoi’s infinity pieces made infinite. Rick’s favorite was a room filled with water that reached up to our knees and was filled with digital fish swimming all around our legs. It was beautiful and so colorful. The images reacted to our movements, which was a little freaky. Perhaps the most gorgeous, but dangerous was the room where you were literally inundated with digital images of flowers. It was crazy – beautiful at first but then both Rick and I had severe vertigo – the whole room was spinning- and we fled.

From there, we headed north, and stopped off in Tsukiji to buy a knife for Rick. I said, oh it’s close to the station, let’s just pop in to the Aritusgu knife shop. Well, we and about 100,000 other people were just “popping by” for lunch. The tiny streets around Tsukiji were crammed with holiday-goers, lining up in what looked like insanely long lines for sushi and ice cream and ramen and grilled anything. It was actually hard to even move at times it was so crowded. That experience drained us a bit, but not deterred we headed for Kappa-bashi, a street in the old part of Tokyo near Asakusa that caters to restaurants and chefs looking for everything needed to run a kitchen or a restaurant – knives, dishes, aprons, plastic fake food for display in the window, the signs and the curtains hanging over the entranceways to restaurants. It was so fun, but very hot and humid (in November!) and we wilted a bit. We bought some “Daigaku imo,” or university potato, a sticky-sweet roasted potato from what looked like an ancient shop, but could find no place to sit and eat them. You cannot eat on the street in Japan, which is hard when you want to eat street food! Rick was a gamer and we then took a subway to a neighborhood called “Kuramae,” described as the “Brooklyn of Tokyo.” It was filled with super hip coffee shops – on every block, filled with mostly fashionable young women – and expensive purse shops. It was a lovely, quiet neighborhood, the kind of place where a man noticed we were having trouble finding a subway station and walked us about 10 minutes to the correct entrance. Lovely.

Near Kappa-Bashi – view of SkyTree

We finished our day eating one of the “5 heritage rice dishes” of Japan – kamameshi – or the old fisherman’s dinner of clams over rice in the Kiyosumi-Shirakawa neighborhood on the east side of the Sumida River. We found a wonderful old hole-in-the-wall, famous for its kamameshi and just down the street from one of our favorite museums ever – the Fukagawa-Edo Museum. We brought Will here when he was little, and Mike and Helen a few years later. This was the first neighborhood where we saw Japanese women out walking in kimono – not the tourists in the rented “kimono” which were all over Asakusa, but just regular people out visiting the museum and temples in their neighborhood. (When I was here in the 1980s, kimono seemed much more common.) Here it seemed just normal. No one was taking selfies.

We are now back in the room – with our stunning view of skyscrapers stretching south along the Sumida River to the Toyosu Market and the bay beyond. Tomorrow – we head to Kanazawa. Hold onto your hats and stay tuned!