Kaga Honda Museum

This guide to the Kaga Honda Museum in Kanazawa is built around a contradiction: a family that earned fifty thousand koku a year, enough to run its own domain, yet by law could never call itself a lord. It follows the Honda retainers, sent from the Tokugawa house to bind itself to the Maeda clan of Kaga, and the fortune and status they built while serving rather than ruling. The building itself was once a military arsenal, its walls laid in red brick rather than samurai-era timber.