The Middle and the Snow Coast

In the villages of Toyama the autumn festival is a fight. A lion — two men under a long cloth, the carved head heavy enough to need both arms — works its way through the village, and a boy in a tengu mask goes at it with a pole. The dance is long and the lion loses. It has to. The lion is the year’s sickness and bad luck, and the whole point of the festival is that it can be driven out by a child with a stick.

Behind the villages stand two mountains that are themselves gods. Hakusan is white most of the year and was worshipped from below long before anyone put a shrine on it. Tateyama was mapped as a landscape of hell and paradise, and monks carried painted scrolls of that map around the country, explaining valley by valley which hell was which and what it cost to be spared it.

Between festivals the lion head hangs in the house. It is not an ornament. It is the face of something that was beaten once and will need beating again next year.

The Maeda of Kaga held a million koku of rice, more than any house in Japan except the Tokugawa themselves. That is a dangerous amount to hold while the shogun is watching, and the Maeda understood it. They spent on culture: gold leaf, lacquer, dyeing, Noh, scholarship. An army would have been read as a threat. A school of painters was read as harmlessness. Four hundred years later Kanazawa still beats almost all of the gold leaf used in Japan.

In 1609 Maeda Toshinaga built a castle at Takaoka and brought seven metal casters to work beneath it. Six years later the shogunate ordered the castle abolished. The town should have died. Instead it kept the casters, moved from iron pots to temple bronze, and today pours most of the bronze in the country.

Inami got its carvers by accident. The temple of Zuisen-ji burned down more than once, and in 1763 carpenters were sent from Hongan-ji in Kyoto to rebuild it. They taught the local men to carve while the work went on. The carpenters went home. The carving stayed.

The snow on this coast is the heaviest in the country outside Hokkaidō. In the mountain hamlets the roofs were pitched at sixty degrees so it would slide off, and the attics under those roofs were worked: silkworms above, and, quietly, saltpetre scraped from the earth under the floorboards and sold to the Kaga domain as gunpowder.

Months indoors give you crafts that nobody in a hurry would attempt. Kutani porcelain is drawn twice — once in dark outline, then filled in five colours over the glaze, then gilded, then fired again. Wajima lacquer is counted by tradition at over a hundred separate steps, each with its own drying time, which is to say that most of the work is waiting.

The same logic is in the woodcarving. An Inami transom is cut from one block, pierced right through, and finished on both faces, because the panel sits in the wall between two rooms and both rooms are entitled to the front of it.