Category
G
Kenroku-en at seven, when it is free and empty.
The garden before the ticket booths open, the market for lunch, teahouse streets in the rain, and crab if it is winter.
The opening scene
Ten past seven in Kenroku-en and the gardeners are out before the visitors – two of them up a ladder adjusting the ropes on a pine, which have been strung into a cone to hold the branches up when the snow comes. Nobody has taken a ticket because the booths do not open for another hour and the garden is simply free until then. There is a heron standing in the pond doing nothing at all. I have the third-greatest garden in Japan more or less to myself, which has not happened to me anywhere in Kyoto in ten years.
The ask
Usually this one arrives as a question rather than a brief: is it worth breaking the Tokyo-to-Kyoto run for two nights somewhere they have never heard of? Happily, yes – Kanazawa is the city people come home talking about, because it hands them the thing they thought they were getting in Kyoto. Old streets, a great garden, craft, superb fish. Without the queue.
You’ve reached the quiet door.
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