My time in Japan began in a studio filled with delicate vases and gilded ceramics. Being a blind guy, I clung to my wife Tracy like a bull terrified of fulfilling his nature in a china shop. It was late November in the Hakuza gold leaf store, which has been operating for nearly 100 years in Kanazawa, a gateway city to the nearby Noto Peninsula, and where 99 percent of Japan’s decorative gold leaf is produced.
Inside the compact space, one of the artists demonstrated the entsuke technique, which involves manually hammering a knob of gold between sheets of paper until the alloy has thinned to a thousandth of a micron. A human hair, by comparison, is a tripping hazard. The finished product is so delicate that it can only be handled with bamboo tongs or manipulated by a gently directed breath. Even the slightest charge of static electricity is enough heat to dissolve the gold. Fortunately, Kanazawa’s humidity prevents this, making the locale essential to the process. You can’t just bang out gold leaf any old place you like. Wham. Down came the hammer again.
Gold leaf is one of many riches of Japan’s west coast, where the climate and the geography have anchored its cultural and agricultural traditions for centuries. Just north of the city of Kanazawa, the Noto Peninsula, where we were heading, is known for its thousands of terraced rice paddies, dairy and salt farming, and squid and abalone, the latter typically harvested by Noto’s female skin divers, or ama. The region is also celebrated for its crafts, such as decorative lacquerware from the sleepy coastal town of Wajima, and the practice of kintsugi, in which a busted object—bowl, plate, cup—is pieced back together like a jigsaw puzzle and fixed with gold leaf binding that yields brightly gilded veins in the cracks. Why hide that something is broken when its repair can make it even more beautiful? Before we left the gold leaf store, Tracy placed a vase in my hands to feel an example. No, its damage had not been the doing of another blind man. The cause had been an earthquake. A big one.
On New Year’s Day in 2024, Kanazawa and the Noto Peninsula were shaken for 50 seconds by an earthquake that measured 7.6 on the Richter scale, one of the most severe in Japan’s history. Tsunamis followed, as did aftershocks, fires, and landslides that killed more than 700 people and injured another 1,000. The peninsula, a rugged finger of land that points north into the Sea of Japan, found its few roadways buried or smashed beyond use. Estimates vary, but more than 100,000 homes were either damaged or destroyed along with 30,000 nonresidential buildings. Recovery since has been a slow and dedicated effort.
The gold leaf craft of kintsugi, practiced widely in the Noto Peninsula, is seen in Japan as a metaphor for life; Higashi Chaya is one of Kanazawa’s three historic districts.
Photos by Sean Hazen
My interest in the aftermath is in part why Tracy and I joined a group of five others, as well as our knowledgeable guide Kaori Irwin, on tour company Walk Japan’s newest trip, which begins in Kanazawa before exploring both coasts of the peninsula. Would our presence feel voyeuristic? Perhaps. But where we travel and how we direct our tourism dollars is more important than ever. To visit Noto, I hoped, would help us glimpse what life could be like after such a catastrophe and how the people who live there carry on when so much has been lost.
Sojiji Soin Temple was founded in 1321. The monastery required repair from earthquake damage.
Photo by Sean Hazen
We left the gold leaf store on foot. Some routes with Walk Japan can push your step count to a dozen miles per day and can involve the use of climbing ropes on ancient coastal trails. Our four-day itinerary—which would take us from Kanazawa to Wajima toward the northwestern tip of the peninsula and across to the eastern town of Noto itself, via a mix of transportation—was gently paced and geared to the modest ambitions of a blind man. Our group made a quick stop to fill our water bottles at the Fukumitsuya sake brewery and fill ourselves with sake while we were at it. Some sips tasted cloudy and rich, some boozy and tart with plum, all of it delicious. But the real marvel to me was the old well tucked away in an alcove.
The tearoom in the Hakuza gold leaf store is decorated with 40,000 pieces of entsuke gold leaf; the Noto Peninsula is renowned for seafood, including yellowtail, pufferfish, and oysters.
Photos by Sean Hazen
Water here flows from Mount Haku (White Mountain), its sacred peak visible from the nearby harbor. We continued our walk through a lively market, red snapper and tuna eyeing us as we passed, and around a historic neighborhood of homes built by the owners of the Kitamaebune trading ships that frequented these ports in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. The rains that fall on Mount Haku filter underground to travel for nearly a hundred years through ancient seashell beds before finally reaching the sake brewery’s well. That process turns the water hard, which is coveted, because bone-dry sake can be made with it. In that way, hard water and its sake are another kind of gold
around here.
Sated, we continued to tread around the harbor, past tidy yards where strings of persimmons dried in the sun. We walked paths lined with hawthorn bushes or dotted with Shinto shrines whose sculptures circulated water for people to wash their hands. Water, water everywhere. I tried to imagine what it must have been like to suddenly feel the ground under me heave when the immensity of the ocean is right there. Nevertheless, we had to keep a pace. Seiichi Yamamoto awaited our visit, we were told.
Yamato Soysauce and Miso Co. has been operating since 1911 in Kanazawa, when Seiichi’s grandfather first opened its doors. Our group was offered cones of the brewery’s own soy sauce ice cream as Yamamoto settled in to begin a presentation about his family’s miso and why, as his T-shirt proclaimed, KOJI IS LIFE.
The restaurant Somamichi also offers overnight stays; Yamato Koji Park in Kanazawa is a national center for soy sauce production. Guided daily tours and tastings are available.
Photos by Sean Hazen
Unfortunately, 20 minutes was all we could spare. Yamamoto paused to consider the number before deflating with a sigh. This was a man who could lecture about miso paste the way a physicist might sermon about quantum mechanics. We devoured our ice cream as he ripped through the 2,000-year history of soy fermentation and the finer points of cultivating good gut bacteria. Koji, we learned, is the mold that transforms rice into sake, soybeans into miso, and wheat into whiskey. Like the sake we’d sampled earlier, the soy fermented in this area is also known for its light sweetness. Had the earthquake done more damage here, that singular flavor—refined by a century of expertise and experimentation—might have disappeared along with the soy brewery itself.
Before we left, Yamamoto gestured in the direction of Mount Haku. Its water, he explained, is why his grandfather built his brewery here, why his soy’s color and flavor differ from anything made in the other regions in Japan, and why Yamamoto continues to make a monthly pilgrimage to the mountain to give thanks. I considered constants and the passage of time, marveling that the rains his grandfather had watched fall a century ago were the source of what I was sipping from my bottle now.
This was a man who could lecture about miso paste the way a physicist might sermon about quantum mechanics.
Gale-force winds whipped about us the next day as we hiked a path from the Fukura Lighthouse to Fukura Port along the coastline. Our bus had dropped us here, about 40 miles north of Kanazawa on the western tip of the
peninsula, where the beaches and ports had suffered some of the earthquake’s worst damage. Waves churned the shore as we picked our way along a rocky bluff, wind wiping away much of our guide Kaori’s narration about how centuries ago fishing boats navigated into harbor here by bonfire. To keep the fires large enough to be seen must have been an incredible challenge during winter storms, not to mention the logistics of hauling a constant supply of dry wood to the beach from . . . where? I listened to the spindly, windswept trees around us and wondered how it had all worked.
After a few hours, we came upon evidence of the earthquake. When it hit, the western side of the peninsula lifted 13 feet in the air, raising its seabed out of the water and extending the beach more than 600 feet beyond its former shoreline. Docks were left dry. The fact that the land here had risen so high is the only reason it had been spared from the ensuing tsunami. Surreal, people in our group kept saying. It looks so surreal. What made the scene come alive for me, however, was the fracture line on the boardwalk. The flat concrete had ruptured along a winding gash and jutted upward, peaking like the apex of a tent. Somebody helped me balance on top so I could walk the crack like a tightrope and feel with my feet how the ground had snapped. I never made it to the end of the fracture line. It was a sensation I won’t soon forget.
In Wajima, restaurant Somamichi now accepts reservations online up to five months in advance.
Photo by Sean Hazen
Later that afternoon, we walked into the restaurant Somamichi. No menus were offered. None were posted by the door, either, or accessed via QR code. Lunch was lunch, and it was on its way. Soon dishes began to arrive, announced to me only with the gentle clap of wooden bowls on a wooden table. We were served a filet of locally caught perch—bony and light—and a sampling of fugu, blowfish sashimi which, if not deconstructed correctly, can cause neuroparalysis in its diners. Out came fried tofu with pumpkin, then a plate of matsutake mushrooms alongside grilled Japanese mackerel. As more food materialized, Tracy and others murmured with delight at the smell of miso and dashi broth marbling the air. I reached my chopsticks into the void and drove my hand through a traffic jam of lacquerware, nearly toppling half my lunch. “Blindquake,” I joked, to quiet laughter.
As we finished our meal, Somamichi’s chef, Yutaka Kitazaki, joined us for tea. He had been away in Kanazawa on New Year’s Day in 2024, when he felt the first tremors and instantly feared for his business back home. Somamichi was scarcely eight months old. He quickly began his drive back to Noto, but a typically 90-minute trip took him seven hours. When the chef made it back, he found his restaurant demolished under rubble.
He needed a plan. Leave? Rebuild? Kitazaki didn’t want to abandon his community, so he moved Somamichi into a temporary space owned by a friend. Two years later, because of the area’s slow and difficult reconstruction, that same temporary space is where we sampled his lotus root and squid sashimi, all served in his friend’s beautifully crafted lacquerware made from Noto’s unique clay and urushi tree sap. Combined and brought to a high polish, their mineral composition creates items that are not only beautiful but also durable enough to last hundreds of years—if, as we were told, you don’t treat them any differently than you would your own skin. Here were two artists helping each other carry on with their respective crafts. In that same spirit, after the earthquake chef Kitazaki began to buy exclusively from local farmers, foragers, and fishers to help keep everybody working. It is a practice he continues to this day. Each morning, he considers what ingredients are available and designs his dishes accordingly. Somamichi’s lack of a menu now made so much more sense. You never know what tomorrow may bring.
Stretching out into the sea, the Noto Peninsula is the northernmost part of Japan’s Ishikawa Prefecture.
Photo by Sean Hazen
The last leg of our itinerary took us by bus to the peninsula’s eastern side, where the land, by contrast, had dropped several feet and where a tsunami of equal size had swamped much of the coastline and its towns. To get there we followed narrow roads, chunks still missing as if Godzilla had taken a crescent-shaped bite. We made only one stop, to taste ice cream at Malga Gelato. Though a small shop in the middle of nowhere, it is festooned with international awards.
Owner Taizo Shibano, the son of local dairy farmers, became interested in doing something more with his family’s milk and developed a keen interest in gelato. After the earthquake he began to work more closely with whatever ingredients he could source from local purveyors, inventing flavors specific to Noto that might, in a small way, support his neighbors.
Today, his menu includes sweet potato gelato, roasted tea gelato, goya (bitter melon) gelato with juniper, and even a scoop that celebrates Noto’s coveted artisanal sea salt. Although it was 10 o’clock in the morning, I inhaled two
sweet potato cones—sweet, earthy, and creamy— in the parking lot before climbing back into the bus to prevent eating a third.
On our walking tour, the community spirit of the peninsula was perhaps most wildly exemplified by someone we met later that day, the man who introduced us to the town of Noto. Outside its marine center, an immense squid sculpture waves as if to welcome you, its tentacles akimbo. From the harbor here, Noto’s squid-fishing ships launch to sea, often taking their crews away from their families for more than a month at a time. To attract the squid from the deep, the boats aim powerful lights into the water while baited hooks await the creatures’ innate curiosity in the shadow under the hull. As a blind guy, I was tickled to learn you can fish with light. I was even more tickled to have this explained to me by a man who wore a facsimile of a squid on his head.
Mr. Squid in font of Tsukumo Bay’s iconic 43-foot-long statue. After a contest, it was named Squid King.
Photo by Sean Hazen
Mr. Squid, whose real name is Takamitsu Haiya, is a local government official and squid fishery enthusiast who was director of emergency operations the day the tsunami towers began to sing. The first thing he did? Find where they put the keys to the elementary school, which is on higher ground and served as the town’s evacuation shelter.
As Mr. Squid recalled the day of the tsunami to us, he was quick to say that the people here were calm and prepared. You must be, when the ocean can suddenly upend the world you know. But that same ocean is what has kept families thriving in Noto for generations, feeding people and grounding their way of life. It is why many have chosen to remain after the earthquake. So, as recovery efforts began, Mr. Squid began sporting the squid on his head, to celebrate the ocean as a thing of bounty and wonder, and to make people smile when smiles can be scarce. A few local kids jostled past our group and recognized him, shouting and pointing. Pleased, he waved back and smiled, as much as a squid can.
The sun was dipping low, rain picking up, but we finished the day walking on the waters of Tsukumo Bay over a path of slick stepping stones. Tracy left me on one for a while so I could listen to the waves peel toward me and dissipate just before they would have wiped me off my feet and swept me out to sea. Overhead I could hear a couple of black kites circling the water on the hunt for food. Predators imply prey, a good sign for the health and recovery of the bay. Everything here returns to water, it seems.
The Noto Tsukumo Bay Hyakurakusou fills its onsens with seawater from Tsukumo Bay.
Photos by Sean Hazen
Later that night, back at hotel Noto Tsukumo Bay Hyakurakusou, Tracy and I soaked in a hot tub of sulfurous water on a deck overlooking the ocean. Some of the resort’s other onsens were a hundred feet underground in caves, where bedrock had protected the property from collapse when the tremors began.
As I relaxed in a cloud of steam, I thought about Mr. Squid. I thought about the chef at Somamichi in his menuless restaurant and about joyful Yamamoto with his unwavering loyalty to the waters of Mount Haku. They have each done their own small part in continuing life in Noto or Kanazawa as they have known it, and as each place has given them. Every effort to carry on is a tiny piece of what holds the peninsula and its gateways together now. Each person, each gelato, each squid hat another tiny bit of gold binding the cracks.
Tsukumo Bay can be toured by stand-up paddleboard, kayak, or sightseeing boat.
Photo by Sean Hazen
How to take this trip
Writer Ryan Knighton traveled with tour operator Walk Japan on the “Onsen Gastronomy: Noto” itinerary, which features light walking and accommodation in Japanese hotels. The price begins at approximately $3,100 and includes a Walk Japan tour leader, four nights’ lodging and meals, luggage transfers, and entrance fees.
