Hakuichi (Main Store Hakukokan) — Local services in Kanazawa

I visited during my trip to Japan from America and did their workshop to gild a pair of chopsticks. I was thoroughly impressed with the entire experience. Everyone was incredibly nice and I had a great time.

I’ve been to every single gold leaf shop in Kanazawa, and this location is hands down the best out of all of them. It has an exhibit with history of gold leaf and how they make it, with quite a few interactive displays for such a small place. In addition, most of the explanations and videos have English options or text. They also had a really impressive art exhibition on the second floor. Even the stairs down to the first exhibit and floor were tastefully put together. The gilding experience itself was a lot of fun, and I had more than enough gold and silver leaf to work with, considering I was gilding chopsticks. The attendant helping me was especially kind and I enjoyed talking with her.

Their shop is also very extensive, and I liked their cups especially. They also have gold leaf soft serve ice cream, which was actually really good. It wasn’t vanilla flavor, more like a milk flavor.

My only gripe is that they are kind of in the middle of nowhere, and hard to get to by public transportation. If it’s too far, I’d recommend a combo of their shop in Higashi Chaya for the ice cream and shopping and the Yasue museum for history and how it’s made.

Overall, I would highly recommend...

I went there on a group trip. Gold leaf was very yummy on ice cream. The soft serve ice cream was the best I have ever had in my life as the ice cream itself was nice and creamy and the gold leaf added to the overall experience. The artworks I count afford because I was super broke (I only had like 8000 yen on me. But they ship overseas, so if you wanted to buy any of the exhibited goods, go for it guys! I think it’s reasonable considering the generous amount of gold in every product.) Exhibition and projected movies are also fabulous 100/10. I think I’ll be excreting gold for a while now! Staff’s translation was good, decent amount of English fluency, for anyone to understand. Ladies were very nice too. I won’t forget any of them.

Thank you for the hospitality and service....

Very good experience. I chose the gold leaf pasting experience, and instead of pasting simple geometric shapes I used a complex design. The shopkeeper was very patient even though I spent much more time than expected to finish the process, and he shared a lot of tricks and recommended process for achieving optimal result. The store also has galleries introducing knowledge about gold and gold leaf on GF, as well as designer crafts on 2F. The gift shop has some unique products not seen in other...