Finding Silence in the Noto Peninsula After the Quake

The Noto Peninsula sticks north into the Sea of Japan from Ishikawa prefecture — about a hundred kilometres of rice terraces, salt farms, lacquer workshops and fishing villages, and until 1 January 2024 it was one of the quieter corners of a country that has plenty of them.

At 4:10 that afternoon a magnitude 7.6 earthquake struck off the northern tip. It killed over 400 people counting disaster-related deaths, destroyed or damaged more than 100,000 buildings, lifted the coastline in places by up to four metres, and cut the peninsula off almost entirely as the single road down the spine failed in dozens of places. A fire destroyed much of the Wajima morning market, which had operated for around a thousand years.

What was there

Wajima lacquerware — wajima-nuri — is among the most refined craft traditions in Japan, built on more than a hundred separate processes and a diatomaceous earth undercoat found locally. Workshops were family operations, often several generations deep, and a great many of them were in the buildings that burned.

Along the northern coast, the agehama method of salt-making — carrying seawater up the beach by hand and evaporating it on sand — survives here and effectively nowhere else in the country. The Shiroyone Senmaida terraces, more than a thousand small rice paddies stepping down a hillside to the sea, are a nationally designated cultural landscape and were badly damaged by landslides.

Going now

The question of whether to visit a place after a disaster does not have a general answer, and it is worth being specific. Ishikawa prefecture and the Japanese tourism agency have been explicit since mid-2024: come, spend money, and do it in a way that does not consume emergency capacity. Kanazawa, the prefectural capital, was largely undamaged and its visitor numbers fell anyway — a secondary economic hit to a city that was fine, caused by cancellations.

The southern peninsula reopened first. Nanao, Wakura Onsen and the Notojima area have hotels operating again, some of them running on reduced capacity after structural repairs. The northern tip around Wajima and Suzu has been slower, and reconstruction there is measured in years rather than months.

The prefecture's position has been consistent since 2024: come, spend money, and do it in a way that does not consume emergency capacity.

The specific way to help

Buy the lacquer. Wajima-nuri workshops that survived, and the ones rebuilding, sell directly and through cooperatives, and a piece bought at source is a direct transfer to a craft that came close to ending. The same applies to Noto salt, which is available from the producers on the north coast.

Stay in the ryokan that have reopened rather than day-tripping from Kanazawa. Wakura Onsen's hot springs have been in use since the eighth century and the inns there employ people who have nowhere else to work locally. Check directly before booking; capacity and opening dates have moved repeatedly.

And do not go to the areas still under reconstruction to look at them. Disaster tourism in the literal sense — driving into damaged villages to photograph collapsed houses — has been a genuine problem in Noto and has been asked about repeatedly by residents who are living in temporary housing next to the rubble.

The wider point

Noto was losing population before the earthquake, as most rural Japanese peninsulas are; the median age in some villages was over sixty and the young had gone to Kanazawa or Tokyo. A disaster on this scale accelerates that by a decade in a single afternoon, because the people who leave for temporary housing elsewhere often do not come back.

Which is why the crafts matter beyond sentiment. Lacquer, salt and the terraces are the reasons a working-age person might choose to stay, and they are the things a visitor can actually put money into. That is a narrow and unromantic definition of what travel is for, and in Noto in the next few years it happens to be the accurate one.