In Kanazawa's Higashi Chaya district the scene repeats every afternoon: a vanilla ice cream cone completely covered in a sheet of gold, photographed before the first bite. It is the city's most shared image and, for many, their only contact with the craft that defines it.
The ice cream does not lie: the gold is real and it comes from here. But it tells the story backwards. It presents gold leaf as a luxury whim, when in Ishikawa it is a working material, a chain of specialists and the result of four centuries of a region that chose to live from its crafts.
01 A sheet that barely exists
A sheet of Kanazawa gold leaf is about one ten-thousandth of a millimetre thick. At that scale the metal lets light through, sticks to skin and tears if touched with fingers: that is why artisans handle it with bamboo tweezers and set it down on pads, never on the hand.
Nor is it pure gold. The most common alloy, the one Japan treats as the standard colour, contains 94.43% gold, 4.9% silver and 0.66% copper. Those small proportions change the tone and ductility of the metal, and every workshop knows several mixes for different uses.
The traditional process is split between two trades. The sumiya beat the alloy into an intermediate sheet, the sumi, one thousandth of a millimetre thick. The hakuya take that sumi, cut it and beat it again until it is ten times thinner. They are different specialists, with different tools and papers, and the product passes from one pair of hands to another.
02 The craft is in the paper
The gold is never struck directly. Each sheet is placed between sheets of paper, and it is the paper that takes the blows, spreads the pressure and lets the metal stretch without tearing. The final thickness, surface and shine of the leaf all depend on the quality of that paper.
In the traditional method, called entsuke, the starting point is a handmade paper of gampi, a plant fibre, with clay added during its making. It is then soaked in a lye made from rice-straw ash and in persimmon tannin, and beaten again and again until it reaches the right texture. That preparation, which the beaters do themselves, is the most laborious part of the whole craft.
A goldbeater in Kanazawa spends more time preparing paper than beating metal.
In the late 1960s a faster method appeared, tachikiri, which replaces the handmade paper with industrial glassine. Today it is the dominant method, and entsuke accounts for a very small share of production. It survives because it gives thinner, more supple and larger sheets with better colour, and because it is the one required to restore Japan's national treasures and important cultural properties.
Japan designated entsuke gold leaf making a selected conservation technique in 2014, and in December 2020 UNESCO added it to its intangible heritage list as part of the traditional skills for conserving wooden architecture. In other words, what is protected is not a pretty object but an ability to repair historic buildings that depends on very few workshops, on increasingly scarce paper suppliers and on a shortage of successors.
03 Why here and nowhere else
Production is first documented in 1593, when Maeda Toshiie, the first lord of the Kaga domain, ordered gold and silver leaf to be made in his territory. Over the following centuries Ishikawa was the heart of that domain, one of the richest in Japan, ruled by the same family until 1871.
In 1696 a regulation restricted metal leaf making to Edo, today's Tokyo, and to Kyoto. In Kaga the craft did not vanish: it carried on discreetly within the domain until, in the mid-19th century, it obtained a licence and, after the change of era in 1868, Edo's production died out and Kanazawa's was left on its own.
Gold leaf was not an isolated case. For generations the Maeda invested in non-military pursuits — noh theatre, the tea ceremony, the decorative arts — and turned a former armour-repair workshop at Kanazawa Castle into a crafts workshop, the Osaikusho. The fifth lord, Maeda Tsunanori, also assembled the Hyakkō Hishō, a collection of more than two thousand samples of craft techniques from across the country that was used to train the domain's artisans.
Most of the crafts now associated with Ishikawa were born or consolidated under that policy: Kaga yūzen silk dyeing, Kutani porcelain from the south of the prefecture, Wajima lacquer on the Noto Peninsula. Gold leaf is the piece that ties them together, because many of them use it as a material.
04 What the ice cream does not tell you
Gold-leaf ice cream is an honest product: the gold is edible, adds neither flavour nor texture and the body does not absorb it. But its fame leaves almost everything else out. Most Kanazawa gold leaf is not eaten: it ends up on lacquerware, porcelain, folding screens, textiles, in the restoration of historic buildings and, in passing, in the decoration of temples, shrines and household altars across Japan.
The second misunderstanding sits on the next shelf. The booklets of facial blotting paper, aburatorigami, are sold as Kanazawa souvenirs without saying where they come from. Their origin is furuya-gami: the beating paper that, after thousands of blows, has become so thin and porous that it no longer works for gold but absorbs oil from the skin very well. For generations geisha in Kyoto and Kanazawa used it to touch up their make-up.
Some shops still sell genuine furuya-gami, labelled as such; other booklets are made directly as blotting paper. Either way, the connection explains why a cosmetic product is part of the identity of a gold city: it is the craft's paper, seen through another door.
05 A territory of linked crafts
If gold leaf is a material, Wajima lacquer is one of its natural destinations. Wajima, in the north of the Noto Peninsula, makes a lacquer known for its durability and for a highly specialised division of labour: a piece goes through more than a hundred stages and several artisans. One of its finishing techniques, chinkin, involves engraving fine lines into the lacquer and filling them with gold leaf or gold powder.
On 1 January 2024 a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck the Noto Peninsula. According to official counts, more than two hundred people died in the quake and several hundred more from disaster-related causes in the months that followed. In Wajima, a subsequent fire destroyed some two hundred buildings around the morning-market street, and many lacquer workshops were damaged or destroyed. In September 2024 torrential rains hit the area again.
Reconstruction is still under way in 2026. Artisans began working in temporary workshops a few months after the earthquake, some of them in other towns of the prefecture, and the morning market operates provisionally inside a shopping centre in Wajima, some distance from its historic street, with just under forty stalls. For a traveller, the most direct way to understand the craft is still to buy Wajima lacquer knowing who makes it and in what conditions they work today.
06 How to look at the gold when you go
None of this means giving up the ice cream. It means, rather, seeing it as the visible tip of something larger. Here are a few ways to do that in Kanazawa.
- Start at the museumThe Yasue Gold Leaf Museum in Higashiyama began in 1974 with the collection of a goldbeater, Yasue Takaaki, and shows the tools of the process alongside screens, porcelain and lacquer decorated with gold. It is one of the few museums in the world devoted to this material.Higashiyama
- Ask how it was beatenIn specialist shops you can ask whether a sheet is entsuke or tachikiri. The answer tells you a lot about the price and the use: the former is the one reserved for restoration and high-end work.entsuke or tachikiri
- Apply a sheet yourselfSeveral workshops in the city offer sessions to decorate an object with gold leaf. They let you check with your own hands what sounds exaggerated on paper: the sheet moves with your breath and tears at a touch.Kanazawa
- Look for gold in other craftsAt the Ishikawa Prefectural Museum of Traditional Arts and Crafts you will see gold leaf applied to Kutani porcelain, lacquer and other crafts of the prefecture. It is the quickest way to understand that gold here is a shared material.Kenrokuen
Afterwards, if you like, order the ice cream. You will know that the sheet wrapped around it has passed through two trades, a paper prepared over weeks and a four-century history. And you will know that the paper that protected it may end up, years later, in a booklet of blotting paper on the counter next door.
