In Kanazawa city, you can find the remains of castle town established by a local feudal load of Samurai worriers, Toshiie Maeda who did enormous role during Azuchi-Momoyama period (1573~1600). Maeda family of feudal load had kept the load of Kanazawa castle as number one crop yield of 1 million among the loads in Japan as the servants to Tokugawa Shogunate. The ancient atmosphere of current Kanagawa city such as Nagamachi Samurai residence, Higashi chaya, Kenrokuen garden, Kanazawa castle and so-on come from the heritage of Maeda family. Kanazawa is called “Little Kyoto” and promoting it as a town having traditional beauty like Kyoto.

This garden is one of the most famous landscape garden in Japan. There are three artificial hills , two beautiful ponds and bipedal stone lantern which is a symbol of the garden that stands with one foot in the water and the other on an islet.

This area is located in Nagamachi district where there are many houses with earthen walls that belonged to Feudal load and still retain an atmosphere of feudal times.

- Mud walls / stone around the Samurai houses: The thick walls are made of mud mixed with gravel and then hardened. The lower part of the mud walls are made by piling up round, half -ground (cracked) riverbed stones. The mud walls are covered with a singled-roof in order to protect the wall’s surface from rain.

This market was opened by Oumi merchant who had lived near Kyoto and moved to this district.

Various shops who sells fresh fishes, fruit & vegetable, dry matter, miscellaneous goods and so-on are lined in this market.

There are lots of souvenir stores and restaurants where you can taste Kanazawa local consumed gourmet in this district.

Machiya in Kanazawa:

Machiya is the urban housing where merchants and craftsmen had lived during Edo ara. Those buildings used to be built on the residence of town people inside castle town and port town.

The characteristic of the buildings are as follows.

• The buildings are built directly in front of the road.

• Each family’s house contact each other with frontage fully spread and stand side by side.

• This is not a terraced house but independent house with pillars and walls not be shared each other.