Kanazawa Castle Park

This guide to Kanazawa Castle Park traces Maeda Toshiie's takeover of the fortress in 1583, just after defeating the man who built it, and follows why his heirs chose to out-earn Japan's other lords rather than raise an army against the shogunate. You'll hear how the castle paid for that peace in repeated fires, from 1602 through the blaze of 1759, and about the artists and craftsmen the Maeda funded instead of soldiers. Stand at the Ishikawa-mon gate, one of the few structures old enough to have outlasted those fires.