Ishikawa slows down the further north you go

Almost nobody looks at a map of Ishikawa before going. Whoever arrives usually does so in Kanazawa, spends two or three days among gardens and teahouses and leaves with the idea of having seen the prefecture. In fact they have seen its densest point, which is also the easiest one to understand.

The whole territory is something else: a narrow band that begins in the snowy peaks of the south, crosses a plain of rice fields, runs past the city and stretches north until it pushes into the sea like a bent arm. The further you go in that direction, the fewer people, the less hurry and the more weight land and water carry in daily life.

01 A two-hundred-kilometre strip

The measurements explain almost everything. Ishikawa runs 198.4 kilometres from north to south and only 100.9 from east to west, with 581 kilometres of coastline for an area of some 4,190 square kilometres. It is a long, thin prefecture, almost all of it facing the sea.

Nor is it a single historical piece. It was formed in 1872 by joining two old provinces: Kaga, in the south, and Noto, the peninsula to the north. The names are still alive and are used to talk about two different worlds, and the numbers separate them clearly: of roughly 1.08 million inhabitants, 86 per cent live in Kaga and only 14 per cent in Noto.

The southern end is closed off by Mount Haku, the highest point in the prefecture at 2,702 metres. Down its slopes comes the water that feeds the Kaga plain, and that sequence, snow above, rice paddy below, city at the end, is the backbone of the territory. Noto, by contrast, has no great summits: it is low relief of hills, short valleys and cliffs that drop straight into the sea.

02 The lord who chose the south

The story of why people gather in the south begins, curiously, on the peninsula. In 1581 Maeda Toshiie received the province of Noto and entered Nanao Castle, high on a mountain. He soon abandoned it because it was far from the port and built another on a hill above the bay. In 1583 he moved his base to Kanazawa, in Kaga, and his family would stay there for fourteen generations.

The Kaga domain came to cover Kaga, Noto and Etchū, with an estimated output of more than one million koku of rice. Among some three hundred domains, it was the largest of the entire Edo period. That wealth was not spread evenly: it was concentrated in the castle town, which invested it in crafts, gardens, theatre and cuisine, and turned Kanazawa into a cultural centre that you can still recognise as you walk it.

Noto remained the province at the edge: land of rice on slopes, of salt and of small ports facing the Sea of Japan. It is not a story of neglect but of different roles. The city specialised in refinement; the peninsula, in sustaining itself with what lay close at hand. That division of roles, set four centuries ago, still explains why Ishikawa feels so different from one end to the other.

03 The south is organised around the bath

South of Kanazawa, close to the border with Fukui, the plain fills with hot-spring towns. Kaga Onsen is the common name for four of them: Yamashiro, Yamanaka, Katayamazu and Awazu. In Awazu there is a ryokan whose founding is dated to the year 718, which gives an idea of how long this area has been receiving people who come to bathe.

The most revealing is Yamashiro. The centre of the town is not a square or a shopping street but a public bath. In the local speech these baths are called soyu, and the district that grew around one, with inns and shops facing it, is called yunogawa. The urban form tells you what matters: hot water is the shared space.

There are two baths facing each other: the soyu, modern and used every day by locals, and the Ko-soyu, rebuilt in 2010 as it was in the Meiji era, with Kutani ceramic tiles on the floors and walls. Spending an afternoon here means understanding the south of the prefecture as a place where pleasure, too, is organised and well served.

The south is also the best connected part. The bullet train reached Kanazawa in 2015, and on 16 March 2024 it was extended towards Tsuruga with stops at Komatsu and Kaga Onsen. The Noto Peninsula has no bullet train: you reach it by road or by local lines. Even the tracks show which way the territory leans.

04 Where the land narrows

North of Kanazawa the coast becomes straight and sandy, and at Hakui there is a sign that something else is beginning. There, for some eight kilometres, Chirihama beach works as a road: the sand is so fine and firm that cars, buses and motorbikes drive along it beside the line of the waves.

It is an amusing oddity, but also a good summary of the hinge between the two Ishikawas. Behind you lies the plain with its city; ahead, the land sharpens between two seas, the outer one, open and wind-beaten, and Nanao Bay, closed and calm, where hot-spring towns such as Wakura sit. From here the journey changes scale.

05 Noto, the tempo of land and sea

In 2011 the FAO recognised Noto's farming and marine landscapes as a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System, one of the first two designations in Japan and in a developed country. The recognition was not given to a monument but to a way of living: small plots, managed woodland, inshore fishing and trades that depend on what is close by.

The examples are very concrete. At Shiroyone, next to Wajima, 1,004 rice terraces run down the slope to the sea, so small and irregular that they do not allow machinery and are worked by hand. On the Suzu coast, salt is still made by the agehama method: seawater is spread over sand, left to evaporate, and the brine is boiled in kilns. Noto is the only place in Japan that preserves the technique.

Wajima adds its own trade: lacquer, strengthened with jinoko, a calcined diatomaceous earth found only there. And in summer, between July and September, the peninsula's neighbourhoods stage some one hundred and eighty festivals in which kiriko, large wood-and-paper lanterns carried on shoulders at night, are brought out into the streets. They are neighbourhood gatherings more than shows, and they say a great deal about a territory where the small community is still the unit that works.

06 The year the north moved

On 1 January 2024, at 16:10, a magnitude 7.6 earthquake shook the peninsula. It reached the maximum intensity on the Japanese scale in Shika and in Wajima. The ground changed shape: some 85 kilometres of coast were lifted, by up to about four metres at some points in Wajima, and the shoreline advanced up to 200 metres out to sea. Some harbours were left dry.

The damage was concentrated at the northern tip. In Wajima, a fire that followed razed some two hundred buildings in the morning market area, one of the city's most characteristic spaces. In Suzu, the great majority of buildings were affected. Official counts record 228 direct deaths and several hundred more linked to evacuation and life in shelters.

Nine months later came the water. On 21 September 2024, 121 millimetres fell on Wajima in one hour, a local record, and more than 540 in three days. There were floods and landslides, at least thirteen deaths, and eight complexes of temporary housing for earthquake victims were flooded. For many families it meant losing, for a second time, the little they had recovered.

Here the character of the territory becomes a practical matter. A long, mountainous peninsula with few roads is hard to reach when those roads are cut. And a small, scattered, ageing population has less room to rebuild. What in normal times is calm, in an emergency is distance.

07 How a peninsula rebuilds

Recovery is moving forward, but at different speeds depending on the place. Noto's local railway, 33 kilometres between Nanao and Anamizu, ran along its full length again on 6 April 2024. The Shiroyone terraces are a good gauge: in 2024 only about 120 of the 1,004 could be planted; in 2025, about 250; and in May 2026, about 480, with the volunteer owner scheme active again for the first time in three years.

The Wajima morning market never stopped existing, although it had to move. In March 2024 its vendors started selling again at a port in Kanazawa, and that summer they set up in a shopping centre in Wajima. In January 2026 they approved a plan to return to their street around 2029 or 2030, with a covered plaza of some 1,800 square metres. On 13 September 2026, for one day, the razed street filled again with orange awnings.

On Nanao Bay, the hot-spring towns are reopening little by little. In Wakura several inns are already receiving guests, one since November 2025, and in July 2026 others joined them, including the first to be completely rebuilt. Work on the seawall continues until March 2027 and the largest establishment expects to reopen around the end of fiscal year 2028. It is the exact picture of the moment: open, but still under construction.

08 How to travel it

The way to understand Ishikawa is to travel it in the direction of its gradient: start in the south, between the mountains and the Kaga baths, pass through Kanazawa and then head up towards the peninsula. On each stretch you will notice that the train gets slower, the villages smaller and the sea more present.

In Noto it pays to go with a different attitude. Check beforehand which accommodation and services have reopened, because the situation changes from one month to the next. Sleep there instead of making a there-and-back day trip, buy from producers and ask questions. On a peninsula that is rebuilding itself, the traveller who stays and spends locally is part, even in a small way, of that rebuilding.

And on the way back south, notice how everything changes again: the roads widen, the bullet-train stations appear, the city thickens. It is the same territory told in reverse. Ishikawa is not understood at one point, but in the journey between its two ends.