Kanazawa’s Kinpaku: Gold from the Mountain Stream Part 2

I’ve heard a rumor that Kanazawa City has some seriously good soul food. Even more intriguing, one recipe in particular has been around since feudal times. This is a dish I’ve got to try. It’s called jibuni and it’s made with duck (or, more recently, chicken), vegetables, mochi (rice dumplings), and wheat gluten. I promptly find a place outside of Kanazawa’s historic and scenic Kenrokuen Garden that serves it and place my order.

©Keri Yazawa

Hold on a minute. What’s this glitter on top of my food? It’s flecks of actual gold called kinpaku, which is the Japanese term for ultra thin, ultra light sheets of gold foil.

Well, I am in a city that’s been named for gold. What else did I expect?

Many cities in Japan have politically descriptive names such as Kyoto whose kanji characters simply mean “capital city” and Tokyo, the “Eastern capital.” Others have geographic names like Osaka, the “big hill”, and Nagasaki, the “long cape.” But then there’s Kanazawa, the “golden mountain stream.” Kanazawa may be hemmed in by mountains and veined with waterways, but there are no natural gold deposits whatsoever. No, the gold arrived here another way. 

In the late 16th century, gold was everywhere. No longer reserved only for gilding the most sacred of relics and revered altars in Japan’s shrines and temples, samurai lords now used gold to adorn their own castles. The trend that was started by the warlord who managed to unify the country after generations of chaos, Oda Nobunaga, gained even more momentum with his successor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

But when Toyotomi died, the golden spigot was abruptly twisted shut by the new shogun of Japan: Tokugawa Ieyasu. Under the Tokugawa family’s rule, the gold foil industry was put in a chokehold. Only craftsmen located in either Tokyo or Kyoto, and who had approval from the government, could work with gold foil. Kanazawa was a long, arduous journey away from either of those great cities, so what happened to bring the entire industry over land, rivers, and mountains?

Enter the Maeda clan. Lords of Kanazawa since before Tokugawa Ieyasu made his grab for supreme power, they were in possession of the richest rice-producing land in the country, but they were also a rumor away from losing it all. The Maedas and the Tokugawas had fought on different sides of the battlefield within living memory, so they were not the best of pals. It was only a matter of time before Maeda found himself in a pickle, and the pickle was this: castles were constructed of wood and wood burned. Lightning strikes were a common culprit and, in the early 1600s, Maeda’s castle was struck, ignited, and burned. Oh, woe! In order to salvage from the ruins a residence that was fit for a self-respecting lord, Maeda asked for permission to bring both gold foil and craftsmen to his town.

Tokugawa’s government grudgingly allowed the repair work and here Maeda saw his chance. With the tiny bit of gold he’d been allowed, he would bring magnificence and splendor to his fledgling city. The craftsmen were directed (or perhaps strong-armed) into making the gold foil “stretch” as far as possible by pounding it even thinner than the material sent from Tokyo.

©Keri Yazawa

Sounds simple, right? Wrong. It takes more than just muscles to hammer out a translucent sheet of gold. Sticky things happen when you bash away at metal: things like adhesion and static electricity. If you’re a craftsman who has managed to muck up a pricey sheet of gold, you might just end up experiencing your own unfortunately “sticky” end.

In order to outwit Tokugawa and dodge the government’s restrictions on the use of gold, the gold foil makers would need something to sandwich the gold foil between, something too smooth to allow the gold to stick and too dense to let the gold get mashed into its fibers, and yet it would have to negate or disperse static electricity. Paper factories were started in the countryside north of Kanazawa. A new type of washi, or rice-based paper, was innovated, and suddenly Maeda’s goldsmiths were in business.

Hammering gold leaf as thin as it can go starts with bundling up gold foil of standard thickness (about 1 micron) into books of rice paper, inserting one square of foil between the sheets and centering each. (There are handy hashmarks on the bamboo pincers to help you check that the margins are even.) Then the book is bundled up and beaten until the foil has expanded from about 2.5” square to 4” square.

Right, so that’s it? We’re done? No. Not even close! Now the expanded sheets of foil must be carefully picked up and inserted between the pages of a new book. At this point, an apprentice learns that handling such thin gold is a fiddly business. The foil is so delicate that a stray breeze or a sharp movement can result in the sheet folding over on itself. And once you manage to get it settled in the general vicinity of where you want it, you have no way to anchor it in place.

Ah, if only you had Pinocchio’s nose, right? Well, it turns out that you do! A “tengu-nose” (which is like a paper version of Frosty the Snowman’s carrot-nose) goes on the end of your left index finger and with this you can gently press the foil to the page in the second book without letting go of your place in the first book.

©Riotaro Mochizuki

Blow gently to flatten the gold, turn the page, gently run the flat side of the bamboo pincers over the sheet to further smooth out wrinkles and now we’re ready to hammer the gold foil even thinner! How thin? One-tenth of a micron is our goal and, with sheets that thin, almost no amount of surface area is too much to gild.

The process is painstakingly time-consuming. And having experienced this process myself during a gold foil making workshop in Kanazawa, I feel a very deep appreciation for the determination and patience of the craftsmen who took on Maeda’s challenge and rose to the occasion.

With every carefully calculated and deliberately stingy allotment of gold foil arriving from Tokyo, Kanazawa’s craftsmen managed to pound it even thinner. So thin, in fact, that there was no shortage of gilding to go around. (Although, I doubt they covered any rice storehouses completely in gold like this one!)

©Keri Yazawa

Yes, Kanazawa now had its gold. Not oceans and rivers of it, mind you, but perhaps enough to fill a “mountain stream.” This is where Kanazawa gets its name from. Not from any gold mined in the ground or panned out of the rivers, but from sheer ingenuity and probably no small amount of spiteful cunning that led to the proliferation of objects glittering with gold gilding.

So. Why is gold foil such a big deal in Kanazawa? Because we don’t let anyone tell us how much of a good thing we may enjoy.

That begs the question: in this day and age, is a mountain-stream’s worth of gold enough?

Continue to Part 3

Visit Kanazawa’s Shiroyamatei to try local soul food: chicken jibuni with flecks of gold foil

To learn about the production process of gold foil, visit the Kanazawa Yasue Gold Leaf Museum

This article was written by Keri Yazawa

About Keri Yazawa
Keri Yazawa has been a resident of Kanazawa City since 2005 and enjoys cycling, stamp-making, and tofu!

©Keri Yazawa