Culture & arts・Kanazawa

Kanazawa Gold LeafKanazawa-haku

Also known as: Kanazawa-haku・Gold Leaf

A traditional craft that hammers a single gram of gold out to cover a tatami mat's worth of area, roughly one ten-thousandth of a millimeter thick, and Kanazawa today accounts for more than 99% of Japan's domestic gold leaf production. The craft is said to date to 1593, when Maeda Toshiie ordered gold leaf beaten in the Kanazawa area, and the Kaga Domain kept producing it for its own official use even after the shogunate restricted the trade elsewhere.

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