The walls surrounding the houses from the Nagamachi district of Kanazawa were rebuilt to look exactly as they were in the old times, before the Meiji Ishin (Meiji Restoration), when the neighborhood belonged to the samurai from the Kaga Clan. However, the height of the walls was different, because originally it was proportional to the rank of the samurai…

The samurai district wall was made from mud on a stone structure and the wall’s roof was made of thin pieces of wood assembled in a fish-scale structure called kokera-ita (kokera means fish scales). Besides its aesthetic role, kokera-ita was designed to protect the wall against the snow.

Nagamachi, Kanazawa

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