Kanazawa Medley

I took Jonathan and Carrie around Kanazawa for a week, and here are some of the pictures and video that resulted. If you're a faithful follower of the blog you've seen some shots of most of these places, but there's always room to get a better angle. Look at this as an advertisement for coming to visit me. You will have this much fun if you come.

After that, a quick explanation/rant about the frustratingly different way Japan approaches winter.

Impromptu jamming with two German pilots and the Japanese bartender.


I'm not doing the cool guitar at the end here, that's Nitta-san, the bartender

Magazine shots at the 21st Century Art Museum

The Turell Room at the Museum. The museum commissioned several works to be a permanent part of the structure as it was getting built.

Carrie takes the Comb Car for a spin.

The inevitable and epic karaoke. This was "Rain on My Parade".

Sometimes it's just a two-shirt night.

Matching deer hats in the snow.

The amazing staff at my favorite yakitori place.

Kenrokuen Gardens in winter.

Trees all over the city are bound up with ropes in this style. It's called "yukitsuri" and it's to protect the trees from heavy snows, although it's also for the aesthetic effect.

I've spent the last 15 winters at 7600 feet in Colorado or in Chicago. It doesn't get anywhere near as cold here as it does there, just a little below freezing. However, I experience the sensation of being cold much much more here.

On the big northern island of Hokkaido, they build their houses with insulation and have central heating because of how cold it gets there. Down on most parts of the main island, however, they've chosen to discard with those luxuries. The houses are built with extremely thin walls and there is never any central heating. This means that after a day at school I come back home and my apartment is only a few degrees warmer than the outside.

People use different methods to combat this problem, from electric and kerosene heaters to boiling pots of water. I don't really like the idea of the kerosene heaters, even though they're the most effective, so I have put up some homemade insulation behind the kitchen curtains where I have those big windows and switched on some combination of three space heaters. This combined with heavy socks, sweaters, and cut-off gloves gets me through pretty comfortably.

But holy hell Creighton, I hear you asking, why don't they at least insulate their houses? The reason I have heard quoted is quite dumb. It is that because of the possibility of earthquakes, they want the walls to be lighter so they have less of a chance of crushing someone. Yup.

Even if that made any sense, there are very few earthquakes here in Ishikawa. I believe that there's also some element of pride at work, not wanting to admit flaws in the system.

Another bizarre thing (to me) is the way they clear snow from the roads. Since it theoretically doesn't get cold enough to really ice up the roads, there are little sprinklers down almost every street in Kanazawa. They don't do this in ever city in Japan, but it gets pretty comical here. They wash away the snow with thousands upon thousands of gallons of water, leaving huge lakes on the edge of the roads where they dip down. I've been splashed more than a few times.

These are all things to adapt to, and as much as I think they're absurd, they aren't changing anytime fast. And it doesn't bother me nearly as much as it does my thin-skinned California friends....