Kanazawa Station

Kanazawa Station greets arrivals with an umbrella and a drum. On the east side, facing the old castle town, a vast canopy of glass and aluminium alloy, made of 3,019 glass panes set in a geometric lattice, spreads over the forecourt. It is called the Motenashi Dome, the "hospitality dome", and the idea behind it is simple and local: Kanazawa is known for its frequent rain and snow, and the city wanted to hold an umbrella over everyone stepping off the train. At the edge of the dome stands the Tsuzumi-mon, a gate 13.7 metres high carried on two massive spiralling pillars that recall the tsuzumi, the hourglass-shaped hand drum played in Noh theatre in the Kaga Hōshō tradition, one of the city's classic performing arts.

Both were completed in March 2005, designed by the architect Ryūzō Shirae, and they did what the city intended: turned a railway entrance into a symbol, one side for the Kanazawa of tradition, the other for the modern city. In 2011 the American magazine Travel + Leisure put Kanazawa sixth in its list of the world's most beautiful stations, the only Japanese station on it. The contrast is the thing to look at: the open, almost weightless mesh of the dome against the heavy, sculptural gate.

The gate is lit from sunset until midnight, and every hour, on the hour, for two minutes it changes into the five traditional colours of Kaga: crimson, indigo, grass green, ochre and ancient purple, one a day on weekdays and all five in turn at weekends. The same palette runs through the Shinkansen station opened in 2015, where the platform screen doors are painted in four of the five Kutani porcelain colours, the fifth being supplied by the blue stripe on the trains themselves, and the tops of the sixty platform pillars are dressed with some 20,000 sheets of gold leaf.

The station itself dates back to 1898, and today it is the hub of the Hokuriku region. The Hokuriku Shinkansen links Kanazawa with Toyama, Nagano and Tokyo, and since 2024 south-west to Fukui and Tsuruga, while local trains run towards Komatsu, Toyama and Nanao, and the little Hokutetsu Asanogawa line leaves from its own underground terminus beneath the square. The side with the dome is known as the Kenroku-en exit, after the great garden in the city centre.

Getting there

The station is on the northern side of central Kanazawa, about 3.7 km from the centre of Kanazawa; the Kanazawa Loop Bus and most city buses leave from the east exit bus terminal. Komatsu Airport (KMQ) is about 30 km away and is linked to the station by a direct bus. Tokyo is reached directly by Hokuriku Shinkansen.