Kanazawa Yasue Gold Leaf Museum

This guide to the Kanazawa Yasue Gold Leaf Museum opens with a 1696 shogunate decree making gold leaf a crime anywhere outside Edo and Kyoto, and follows the Kaga domain's goldbeaters who kept hammering foil in hidden workshops around Kanazawa for roughly a hundred years anyway, covering for each other with the same lie whenever an official came asking. It traces how a 1808 fire at Ninomaru Palace forced the shogunate's hand, and how the industry only found real freedom once the shogunate itself collapsed during the Meiji Restoration. The guide also introduces Yasue Takaaki, the local goldbeater whose personal collection became this museum in 1974, rebuilt here in the Higashiyama district where the old underground workshops once operated in plain sight.