The takeaway

Gold leaf is kinpaku, and Kanazawa has had a near-monopoly on making it in Japan for four hundred years. The Maeda lords encouraged it along with the lacquer and the silk dyeing, and the climate turned out to help – the humidity off the Sea of Japan keeps the paper from drying and tearing while the gold is being beaten.

The numbers are the interesting part. A single gold coin is beaten out until it covers about ten tatami mats. The finished leaf is around one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick – thin enough that you cannot pick it up with your fingers without destroying it, thin enough to see light through. Craftsmen separate the sheets with bamboo tools and work in rooms with the windows shut, because a draught ruins a day’s work.

Where it goes. The Golden Pavilion in Kyoto. The Konjikido at Hiraizumi. Temple altars and Buddhist household shrines across the country. Lacquerware, ceramics, kimono thread. Cosmetics. And, since the 1980s and the bubble years, food – gold on sushi, gold in sake, gold on an ice cream in a paper cone.

Go and beat some yourself. Several workshops in the Higashi Chaya area run an hour-long class where you apply leaf to a small box or a pair of chopsticks, and it is far more absorbing than it sounds – the stuff moves if you breathe near it. Hakuza, in the same district, has a storehouse tea room entirely lined in gold leaf, which is free to look into and completely absurd.

Is the ice cream worth it? It costs about nine hundred yen, it tastes exactly like soft serve, and you will absolutely photograph it – so have it once and enjoy the silliness, somewhere with a view of the teahouse street, and then go and buy a small lacquer box with gold in it instead – that is the thing you will still have in ten years.