2025-11-21

As so often happens, the halfway mark of the trip was also where the culture shock and jetlag finally settled down enough to start rolling with things.

It also helps that Takayama is a “tourist town” where they go out of their way to provide a great experience for both Japanese and foreign visitors. We stayed in a hotel with a nice onsen (that didn’t care about my tattoos!¹) right in the middle of the central old town district.

That meant we could walk to dinner at a lovely 50-year-old restaurant that specialized in both Hida beef (the local wagyu, which challenges Kobe for reputation in Japan) and local wild-foraged veggies and mushrooms, which I had been dreaming of since our last visit.

We went through the morning market and historical village the next day, as well as the largest Shinto shrine in the city, which also hosts the twice-annual city festivals with four-story “portable shrine” and “theater” floats.

Then is was back on the train for a relatively short trip to Kanazawa, a mid-sized city on the Sea of Japan.

We struggled a bit to get into our hotel; the checkin was at a much larger and fancier hotel near the train station, which we realized only after we had walked to the more distant location and were unable to get into the building.²

We also failed to account for the fact that it was Friday night, so when we set off in search of dinner we were turned away from the first three places we tried. We finally ended up at a tiny sushiya near the train station run by a couple in their 80s who spoke zero English and had only omakase available.

The only other patrons over the almost two hours we were visiting from Spain, which apparently is kind of a niche for this place. (Most of their reviews are in Spanish, and pretty positive, so Spaniards visiting Kanazawa sort of end up there by default.)

Humorously, despite that affinity the proprietors spoke absolutely no Spanish at all; at one point, I was translating from Japanese to English and back, while one of the other groups did English to Spanish for the other diners.

It was definitely one of those meals where the story is better than the food.

Footnotes

1. I have a few unobtrusive tattoos on my arms and one leg, which don’t even get me a second look most places. In Japan, however, there’s a very strong taboo against showing tattoos in public, and most public baths won’t allow anyone to use them if they have visible ink. ↩

2. We avoided booking stays via AirBnB for this trip after having some mixed results finding and getting into them when we were here 10 years ago. Unfortunately, the online booking services we used to find good rates failed to disclose which properties were actually apartments in a small building rather than rooms in a full-service hotel. ↩