Sneaking around the Myoryuji (Myōryū-ji) ‘ninja’* temple, Kanazawa

Ninjas, broadly speaking, were black clad spies who preferred to use stealth and guile to get the job done whilst avoiding a fight if they could. Samurai on the other hand were armoured warriors tooled up in all the gear and always looking for a scrap.

Kanazawa is a reasonably sized city on the coast of the Sea of Japan, a couple of hours train ride north west across Honshu Island from Tokyo. It struck us as a calm and peaceful place with plenty of historical sites and gardens to recommend it. It’s one of the best preserved Edo Period cities in the country and famous for its Samurai and Chaya districts, huge castle and gardens and high concentration of buhddist temples.

The Myoryuji ‘ninja’ temple (or ‘ninja-dera’) is just over the Sai river down a tight and otherwise nondescript residential street. What we hadn’t realised until we arrived is that the temple is to this day an active Buddhist place of worship and sacred site. This was definitely a ‘shoes off’ kind of visit.

The building was constructed in the late 1500s as part of Kanazawa castle’s defensive measures, as a place where defenders could look out and survey the approaches for marauding enemy.

What makes Myoryuji unusual is that this was not to be an obvious tall lookout post. It was built in a residential area as a covert facility indistinguishable from the surrounding houses. To enable it to function while not being found out, it was designed with a wide range of secret passageways, escape routes and lookout places built into the fabric of the building. Certainly as we approached and entered up the wooden front steps there was no hint of what lay inside aside from the trappings of the Buddhist temple that it now serves as.

The second aspect which makes this particular temple stand out also arises from its location amongst other residential buildings. Local planning laws (nothing changes does it!) stated that buildings could not be more than three stories high in this area. Using a cunning system of passageways and half floors, Myoryuji temple appears to have two floors to the casual observer but there are actually four!

It is mandatory to take a guided tour (more on this below), not least as it would be extremely easy to get lost or take a tumble within the labyrinth of many hidden stairways, passages, tunnels, one-way tours and trap doors – all in what is a relatively small footprint. As we went round it was easy to imagine the place in times of alarm becoming a lot like the maze in popular TV show Takeshi’s Castle.

Unlike the TV show, this small fortress is also equipped with cunning ways for the defenders to maim their enemy. We particularly liked the entrance stairs with paper risers so that a defender hiding underneath in the shadows could stab upward into the shins of any attacker attempting to assault up the stairs into the temple.

One other room in particular will stay in our memories. If the occupiers of the temple were defeated in battle it was expected that the leader would take himself off and perform ritual Seppuku or hara-kiri as part of the code of honour. A special room was constructed and contained the appropriate paraphernalia for this task, and most importantly this room had a one way door. Once the leader had made the decision and entered the room, there was no exit for the body, only the soul. The room, on the fourth floor, is made up of four tatami mats, a number never usually used. The number four, shi, is unlucky in Japanese as it can be pronounced the same as the word for death.

Overall this was a fantastic visit, very different from anything else we experienced on the trip. That was partly down to the myriad of secret elements designed into the building. But it was also because of the surprisingly small size of the place and the Buddhist temple at tis centre, which made it a much more intimate experience than the bigger castles we’ve been to recently.

*we should add here that in reality the temple was never populated by actual ninjas! The association with ninjas has come much more recently. All of the secret and hidden aspects of the temple are genuine and were designed for use by the defenders of the castle, but they weren’t ninjas.

Kenroku-en botanic gardens

Kanazawa is renowned as a cultural and botanical joy of a city. The most well known garden, Kenroku-en (the garden of six attributes) is a short walk or bus ride back over the river from the temple and a delight to visit. If you’re hoping for a typical Japanese garden scene with serene views across lakes surrounded by maple trees then you are in the right place. So much so in fact that Kenroku-en is said to be one of the three great ‘perfect gardens’ of Japan. It is not enormous, but it is hard to argue against its ‘perfect’ tag and is particularly famed for its beauty throughout all seasons (not just a one trick cherry blossom pony). We were treated to seeing Japan’s oldest fountain and the famed Kotoji-tōrō, a two legged stone lantern, which was a bit smaller than we’d expected. The garden was originally the outer garden of Kanazawa’s impressive castle, and we walked through the Ishikawa-mon Gate and explored the castle grounds on our way back to the centre of town.

Kenroku-en is certainly worth the visit to take in the magnificent gardens. But a further attraction especially for the kids was that around its entrance several stores sell the gold leaf covered ice creams that Kanazawa is also famous for. 99% of the gold leaf produced in Japan comes from Kanazawa, and like the true tourists we are, we made sure to eat some of the inert, tasteless metal.

How we did it

In keeping with its secretive past and status as a current religious shrine, it was about as tricky to get into the Myoryuji temple today as it would have been as an attacker in the 1600s. Visiting is by guided tour only, with bookings opening up 7 days in advance of your preferred date of visit. Moreover, they only take bookings by telephone (yes, a voice call by telephone) on +81 762410888. Thankfully the standard of their English is substantially better than our Japanese, and in common with every single person we met in Japan they were wonderfully friendly and patient. In these relentlessly digital days, it was a heady mix of refreshing and nerve-racking to travel across the country to visit the temple having booked, but at the same time possessing not a single piece of confirmatory evidence that the conversation had ever taken place. The tours are only in Japanese, but we were given a booklet with translations of most of the important locations, and were able to follow along pretty well.

It is worth knowing that the public transport system around Kanazawa is as effective here as it is in the rest of Japan – which is to say, phenomenal. Several bus routes run to the end of the street on which the temple lies, including the circular buses and several linear lines. We just used google maps to tell us which one would be next and caught it from the bus station by the main central rail station. We paid tapping off (at the front of the bus) using our Welcome Suica IC cards which we used across Japan.