Finding Silence in Japan's Overlooked Hokuriku Region

A travel writer who has called Kyoto home for 37 years set out to escape the crowds that have overwhelmed Japan's most famous city. By 2023, more than 75 million visitors were packing into Kyoto's temples and restaurants each year, prompting friends to ask how they could find something traditional.

His search led him to the Hokuriku region, specifically Ishikawa and Fukui prefectures, where he discovered quieter corners of Japan. In Yamanaka Onsen, a hot-springs resort in Ishikawa that has been a pilgrimage site for over 1,300 years, he stayed at the Kayotei ryokan, an intimate 10-suite inn built nearly 50 years ago by Masanori Kamiguchi, now 93, who closed his father's multistory hotel to showcase regional arts. The inn works with about 30 artisans, and guests can visit some of them.

The writer also explored Hanamurasaki, a sixth-generation inn run by a young couple who lived abroad, offering a contemporary take on tradition. In Fukui prefecture, he visited Eiheiji, the largest Zen training center in Japan, where Dogen Zenji founded the first Soto Zen monastery in 1244. He joined a morning service where dozens of monks chanted and moved in intricate patterns, a ceremony he said he had never witnessed in 37 years around Kyoto's temples.

Along the way, he met locals proud of their traditions, including a young woman who carves knife handles and also works as a pop star, and a female Shinto priest who took over after her husband's death. He noted that Fukui received fewer than one foreign visitor for every 600 going to Tokyo in 2023, and Yamanaka had barely 36 foreign visitors a day that year. The piece also highlights several hotels and artisan visits in the area, including Kayotei, Hanamurasaki, Hakujukan, and a riverside stay connected to a sake distillery.