You have done Kyoto. You have seen the temples, walked Gion at first light to dodge the crowds and bought a bowl in a shop near Kiyomizu without really knowing who made it or where. What you left pending was not another monument but the other half of that display case: the lathe, the kiln, the painting table. This article is for you if that curiosity outweighs the must-see list, and if in exchange you accept a slower, greyer territory that, in its northern part, is still rebuilding.
01 After Kyoto, the workshop
The hypothesis is simple: Ishikawa works for this traveler because here the crafts are not in a museum at the end of the trip but in the very villages where you sleep. In Kyoto, craft is something you buy; in southern Ishikawa you watch it being made, touch it and, in some cases, try it on a lathe for a quarter of an hour. The capital, Kanazawa, is a place you pass through: a bullet-train station and the stop where the bus to Noto leaves. The territory is elsewhere.
What you are after, if you are this profile, is unspectacular: an open workshop, a conversation across a counter, a hot bath at the end of the day and a village that does not empty of local people at six in the evening. What you tend to avoid are queues, timed tours and places that exist only to be photographed. That list describes Kaga Onsen well and the most-visited part of Kanazawa badly.
02 Sleeping where the work is done: Kaga Onsen as a base
Kaga Onsen is not one village but four: Yamashiro, Yamanaka, Awazu and Katayamazu. For this profile the first two matter most, because each has its own craft. Yamashiro is a centre of Kutani porcelain, known for its intense colours and dense painting; Yamanaka, of turned lacquerware. From the station a local bus takes about 15 minutes to Yamashiro and about 30 to the Yamanaka terminal, and many ryokan offer free transfers from the train.
The clearest proof that crafts here are for use rather than display is in the bath. In the centre of Yamashiro there are two public baths: Soyu, the modern one, and Ko-soyu, a reconstruction of the bath that stood there in the Meiji era (1868-1912), decorated with Kutani tiles, lacquer and stained glass. Entry to Ko-soyu costs 500 yen and it opens from 6:00 to 22:00, except on the morning of the fourth Wednesday of each month. True to the old model, it has no separate shower area: you wash with water from the bath itself, as was done then. For someone coming from Kyoto's carefully staged ryokan, this is onsen as a neighbourhood habit.
In Yamashiro itself is the Kutani Kiln Museum, built beside the remains of an old kiln, with space to try pottery techniques. General admission is 350 yen, it opens from 9:00 to 17:00 and closes on Tuesdays. For this profile the collection is not the point; the sequence is: see the kiln in the morning, recognise the same colours in the bath tiles in the afternoon and find them again on the dinner plates.
03 Yamanaka: the lathe before the lacquer
Yamanaka lacquerware has been defined from the start by woodturning: craftspeople work with lathes called rokuro and precision chisels to bring out bowls, cups and trays before anyone applies a single coat of lacquer. For someone who has already seen finished pieces in Kyoto, this is what was missing: the step before, the one that decides the grain the bowl will have. Because the wood is natural, every grain is different and it changes with the depth of the cut.
At Rokuro-no-Sato, a workshop in a traditional house on the outskirts, you can turn your own bowl in a session of about 15 minutes guided by a local craftsperson; soup bowls start at 3,000 yen. It opens from 9:00 to 17:00 and closes on Wednesdays and public holidays. Here the first serious friction appears: it is about five minutes by car from central Yamanaka, but about 35 minutes on foot from the bus terminal. Without a car or taxi, the visit eats half a morning.
The rest of Yamanaka is done on foot. The Kakusenkei gorge has a path of about a kilometre along the river, with three bridges, among them Korogi-bashi, the wooden one. In the centre is Kikunoyu, the village's public bath. The rhythm it proposes is the one this profile tends to look for: workshop in the morning, walk at midday, bath before dinner.
Getting between villages, however, is not easy. The tourist bus that links the station with the four villages, the CAN Bus, costs 500 yen per ride, but the mountain route, the one through Yamashiro and Yamanaka, has one bus every two hours. Anyone who wants to string together the Kutani kiln, the Yamanaka lathe and the gorge in a single day needs a car, a taxi or patience.
In Kyoto, craft is something you buy. In southern Ishikawa you watch it being made, and sometimes try it on a lathe for a quarter of an hour.
04 Noto, told as it stands in 2026
The Noto Peninsula is the other half of the territory and, for this profile, the home of Wajima lacquer. It is also the hardest part to write about. On 1 January 2024 a strong earthquake caused widespread damage and many deaths on the peninsula; the north, especially Wajima and Suzu, was hit hardest. In Wajima, besides the collapsed buildings, a large fire destroyed much of the centre, including the morning-market street. In September of the same year, more than 540 millimetres of rain in 72 hours caused floods and landslides that left over a hundred communities cut off.
By late summer 2026, this is what you can expect. The Wajima morning market operates provisionally at the Wajima Waiwai Plaza shopping centre, from 8:00 to 12:00, except on the second and fourth Wednesday of each month; the reconstruction plan finalised in January 2026 places its return to the market street around 2029–2030, although on 13 September 2026 that street already hosted a one-day market. The Wajima Nuri Kaikan has reopened, with a shop on the ground floor and a small museum upstairs for 300 yen, as has the Wajima Museum of Urushi Art, for 630 yen. The festival-float museum, the Kiriko Kaikan, remains closed. From Kanazawa there are direct buses to Wajima: about two hours and 2,300 yen each way.
The Shiroyone Senmaida rice terraces, 1,004 small paddies stepping down to the sea, are the best-known image of northern Noto. The earthquake cracked about 80% of them and damaged the irrigation channels; the September rains brought down part of what was being repaired. Recovery is led mainly by residents, with help from volunteers, and in 2025 rice was planted in about 250 paddies. If you go, you will see a landscape half rebuilt, not the usual photograph.
Further south, on Nanao Bay, Wakura Onsen is the simplest way to spend a night in Noto: a limited express from Kanazawa takes about an hour, for around 2,500 yen, with departures every two to three hours. But the spa town is only half there: according to japan-guide's August 2026 update, about half of the lodgings have reopened, several ryokan need to be demolished and rebuilt, and some of the open ones mainly serve reconstruction workers. The Noto Railway between Nanao and Anamizu has run in full since 6 April 2024.
05 The Hokuriku sky and the Tsuruga change
Ishikawa is wet, and almost all year round. Kanazawa averages 2,401 millimetres of rain a year, with about 194 days of precipitation. Winter is the toughest season for anyone wanting sun: December brings 301 millimetres spread over 24 days, January barely 62 hours of sunshine and 67 centimetres of snowfall. For this profile, the grey has an upside: it is easily spent inside a workshop and inside a bath. But if your idea of a trip includes clean light and blue skies, the month you choose matters more than in Kyoto.
The other friction hits precisely the traveler coming from Kyoto. Until March 2024 the Thunderbird express ran straight to Kanazawa. Since 16 March 2024 it ends at Tsuruga, where you switch to the bullet train; the change is well signposted and takes a few minutes, but there is no longer a direct train, and every Thunderbird seat must be reserved. The upside is that the bullet train stops at Kaga Onsen before Kanazawa, so coming in from Kansai the hot-spring villages come before the capital.
06 Verdict
Ishikawa works for someone who already knows Kyoto and wants to see the other side of the counter: sleep in Yamashiro or Yamanaka, bathe among Kutani tiles, turn a bowl and spend a day in Noto knowing what they will find. The natural order is to enter from Kansai, spend three or four nights in Kaga Onsen, use Kanazawa as a transport hub and give Noto either a day by bus to Wajima or a night in Wakura, booked well ahead.
It does not work if you need sun, if you do not want to depend on a bus every two hours or pay for taxis between villages, or if you want to see Noto as it appeared in pre-2024 guidebooks. Nor if what you are after is another Kyoto: here the temples and gardens are not the reason. The reason is that, for a few days, objects stop being souvenirs and go back to being someone's work.
