Teramachi

This guide to Teramachi in Kanazawa starts with a number that sounds ordinary until you learn why it exists: twenty-nine staircases inside a temple that was never meant to look complicated. In 1643, Lord Maeda Toshitsune moved Myoryuji here and dressed it as a modest two-story chapel, at a moment when the shogunate had just banned lords from building fortresses and treated any sign of defiance as treason. The guide follows what that modest wooden face was hiding, from a floor plan built to confuse strangers to a well said to run twenty-five meters underground. It sets its scene among the seventy temples still lining this quiet street today.