On the road again

Following a few days of sightseeing around Hiroshima we packed up the car and headed north towards the Japanese Alps. 450 miles and a gazillion tunnels later we arrived in Kanazawa. The top sights to see in Kanazawa are the Kenrokuen gardens (one of the top three in Japan), the castle and the old Geisha and Samurai districts. Kanazawa is a really beautiful, cosmopolitan city and I wish we had more time to spend there, it actually felt really European with lots of lovely little boutiques, museums and coffee houses to wile away the hours in.





One of the best things about Kanazawa was visiting the Ninja Temple,it's the only one of its kind in Japan and from the outside looks like an ordinary temple, but lurking inside were secret hiding places for the guards and a donation box which also functioned as a pit trap. It was so cool and well worth the guided tour even though it was in Japanese. It actually has nothing to do with Ninjas and more to do with Samurais but so called "Ninja" because of all its tricks. Those Samurais were really sneaky, they managed to build all these nifty little tunnels, concealed doors and even hid an entire fourth floor inside the temple. When you go down the stairs you can even see the secret space where guards with long, menacing spears waited to jab the legs of intruders through the paper screens between the steps. On the fourth floor was the suicide room where the Lord would disembowel himself if the temple was overun by enemies, once you shut the door it could not be opened from the inside so I guess your time was really up.

Four is a very unlucky number in Japan as it is very similar to the Japanese word for death. Hence the suicide room on the fourth floor consisting of four tatami mats. Many hotels in Japan even skip out the number four in their rooms. As luck would have it Martin and I live on the fourth floor of our apartment block, there are two apartments on each floor and the one next to ours was empty for the last year - I wonder why?! Anyway, armed with the luck of the Irish and a bottle of holy water we've always been very happy in apartment 401.