Today was the first day of the trip when it rained, though it was still too warm to wear a jacket. I took a local train from Kurashiki to Okayama during the morning rush hour and was duly packed like a sardine, standing room only, together with office workers and secondary school pupils. The next stop was Shin-Osaka and from there up the western side of Lake Biwa (Japan's largest lake and one of the oldest in the world) where the train passed lots of rice paddies, then on to Tsuruga (the current western terminus of the Hokuriku Shinkansen line) and finally my destination, Kanazawa on the coast of the Sea of Japan.

I dumped my bag at the hotel, which was near the station, and walked for half an hour to Kenrokuen, another one of the three great gardens of Japan. Like Kōrakuen (see yesterday), this is a large park with an associated castle, but the star attraction for me was a small ornamental garden with bridges and ponds which you can see near the end of the video below.

I then visited the nearby 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, a distinctive circular building opened in 2004.

The image below is of a sign on the side of a building which caught my eye. Between me, Claude, Gemini, and Google Lens we established that it won an advertising award from Kanazawa's mayor but we're not entirely sure about what it says because the Japanese and English letters don't quite match. It's something like "Luna Daisy". There was also some disagreement over whether it's the name of an apartment block or a hair salon (at one point Claude said "Ha! Well Gemeni is wrong."). Anyway, it's a nice sign and other images we found online showed the moon lit up at night.

A massive wooden gate stands outside the east exit to Kanazawa station. It's modelled after a tsuzumi, a kind of Japanese drum.

The hotel I'm in (Hotel Nikko) is a big one. I'm on the 26th floor and have a view over the station. In the photos below the Tsuzumi-mon Gate is next to the right end of the arched structure near the middle.