One Spring, Two Cups

This experience is built around one thing: water. Yamanaka's mineral-rich mountain water made it one of Japan's great lacquer capitals — the humidity cures the lacquer, and over 80% of the country's natsume tea caddies are turned here, a craft that one family has kept for generations — and Ariya will introduce you to them. You begin with a tea ceremony at the family's samurai house, an Ishikawa Tangible Cultural Property, drinking fresh matcha from bowls shaped by hands with four hundred years of tradition behind them. From there, Ariya walks you through her favourite craft shops in Yamanaka — a town that holds Japan's only woodturning school and its highest concentration of master turners. That same water shapes what's poured at day's end. You stop first at Hasebe Shrine to thank the sake gods, then sit down to a tasting and pairing led by one of Japan's foremost sake sommeliers — with sake from across Ishikawa, including Yamanaka's own Matsuura brewery.

Bashō came in 1689, and his nine-day stay became Oku no Hosomichi, one of the great travel books — he wrote that being here revived him. Three centuries later, your short walk through Kakusenkei Gorge and the town is meant to do the same. In the tea room, holding a Yamanaka lacquer bowl in your hands, you see for yourself what Tanizaki meant in In Praise of Shadows: "darkness is an indispensable element of the beauty of lacquerware." The gold rises out of the dark. And this is the place to understand it. See examples of the family's exquisite handiwork in the natsume, the ornamental tea caddy from which the powdered matcha is scooped. This is a curated multi-strand cultural afternoon with a cultural insider who lives in Yamanaka — a priestess, bilingual, embedded in the culture but able to speak about it — who threads three strands into one story: a hosted tea ceremony with the lacquer family, the craft-town shops, and a sake tasting/pairing led by one of Japan's renowned sommeliers.

Ariya is an ordained priestess of Horenji Temple (Pure Land Buddhism), born in Kyoto and raised in California. She fell in love with Ishikawa Prefecture and moved from Kyoto to Yamanaka Onsen with her family, where she enjoys the area's natural beauty and community-minded society. A student of the Urasenke school of tea ceremony, she welcomes international guests to her adopted town as a guide and part-time Japanese teacher. Her knowledge of Japanese history and religion — and her fluency in English — helps you connect with the local people you meet along the way.

Comfortable shoes for the short walk through Kakusenkei Gorge and the town. Layers for the weather, which shifts with the seasons in the valley.