The City That Was Spared

Kanazawa sits in a pocket of land between the Sea of Japan and the mountains, with a river running along each side of its old centre, the Sai to the south and the Asano to the north. Polly came in over grey tiled roofs and narrow lanes that curved for no obvious reason, past a long castle wall the colour of wet stone, and settled on a bridge rail above brown water moving quickly toward the sea.

Almost every Japanese city of this size looks new at its heart, because almost every one of them burned. Bombing raids in the last year of the war, through nineteen forty-four and into nineteen forty-five, destroyed the wooden downtowns of city after city. Kanazawa had no large war factories and no target worth the fuel, and it was spared. What stands here is not a careful reconstruction of something lost. It is the thing itself.

That accident left the city with a street plan almost nobody else still has. The lanes bend, stop short, and double back, laid out that way deliberately by the lords who built the castle town, so that an attacking army would lose itself inside the city rather than march straight at the gates. Earthen walls topped with small tiles still line the old samurai quarter.

Above all of it, on a low hill in the middle of everything, sat a broad park of pale roofs and long stone ramparts, with a famous garden pressed against its far side. Polly lifted off the bridge rail and went that way, following the curve of the river toward the hill.