Inami Woodcarving Town

Locally knownKnown to people who live here. Not in the international guidebooks.

Recherche et rédaction Hinato

InamiwoodcarvingZuisenjiNantoJapan Heritage

Préfecture de Toyama · Nanto

36.5587°N, 136.9720°E

Inami carves wood, and it has done since the eighteenth century, when carpenters rebuilding the temple at the top of the street brought in craftsmen from Kyoto to do the ornamental work and the technique stayed. Yokamachi-dori runs eight hundred metres from Zuisenji down through the town and is lined with workshops with their fronts open — you walk past men working on transom panels, temple gates and lion heads at arm's length.

The details are the joke and the pleasure: the bus stop signs are carved, so are the house nameplates, so is a good deal of street furniture that had no obligation to be. The Ministry of the Environment put the sound of mallets and chisels along this street on its list of a hundred soundscapes worth keeping, which is a strange and very Japanese kind of designation and entirely justified once you are standing there. Zuisenji at the top is 600 years old and has the carved gate that started it.

Informations essentielles

Horaires d'ouverture

Street open at all times | Workshops generally daytime, and vary individually | Zuisenji keeps its own hours

Fermé: Street open year-round | Individual workshops set their own rest days

Tarif d'entrée

Free to walk the street | Zuisenji admission charged separately — confirm locally

Meilleure saison

Year-round | Weekday mornings for the sound of the workshops

Durée de visite

1.5–2.5 hours

Comment s'y rendre

Informations d'accès

Inami, Nanto. By car from Tonami IC; by bus, from JR Kanazawa Station on the Kaetsuno Nanto-Kanazawa line to the Zuisenji-guchi stop then a short walk, or from Takaoka Station on the Shogawa-Komaki line to Inami-chuo then a short walk. The street is free to walk; Zuisenji charges separately — contact the Inami tourist information office on for current admission.

Guide d'initié

**Come on a working day.** The workshops are businesses, not exhibits. Weekday mornings are when the chisels are actually going, and the sound along the street is the reason the place is on a national soundscape list. **Walk uphill from the bottom.** Yokamachi-dori runs up to Zuisenji, and doing it in that direction ends at the temple gate that the whole craft grew out of. The reverse just means walking downhill past shops. **Look at the small things.** Carved bus stop signs, carved house plates, carved shop signs. Once you start noticing them the street stops being a row of buildings and becomes a demonstration. **Buying is possible and not cheap.** Workshops sell, from small pieces up to commissioned transom panels. Prices reflect that these are one-off pieces by named craftsmen. **Combine with Johana or Gokayama.** Both are in Nanto and within half an hour by car, which makes a full day out of a municipality most itineraries reduce to a single UNESCO village.

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