Takaoka, the Toyama town the bullet train hurries past on its way to Kanazawa

The Hokuriku Shinkansen sets you down at Shin-Takaoka (新高岡) and most people stay on it, bound for Kanazawa twenty minutes south. Step off instead and the town does not rush to meet you. A local two-car train rattles you to Takaoka (高岡) proper, and from the south exit a plain residential lane runs toward a temple that three national treasures call home, with almost no one on the path ahead of you.

The temple most trains pass

Zuiryū-ji (瑞龍寺) is a ten- to fifteen-minute walk from Takaoka Station, past vending machines and parked bicycles, and it asks 500 yen at a small window. The Sōtō Zen complex was finished around 1659 to mourn Maeda Toshinaga, the lord who built the town, and its Sanmon gate, Buddha Hall, and Lecture Hall were designated national treasures in 1997. The layout is severe and symmetrical: a gate, a lawn, a hall, all on one axis, the way a Chinese Zen manual would have drawn it.

What stays with you is the wooden corridor that wraps the compound. It runs unbroken around the courtyard, its boards worn pale, and in the late morning the light comes in low and sideways between the pillars. Monks still sweep here. Open hours are 9:00 to 16:30, shortening to 16:00 from mid-December through January, and admission stops half an hour before the doors close.

The corridor is the point. You walk the whole square without once stepping on earth, and the town outside goes quiet behind the beams.

A street that still pours bronze

Ten minutes north of the station the pavement turns to cobbles. Kanayamachi (金屋町) is a 500-metre lane of latticed houses — the fine vertical slats are called senbon-gōshi (千本格子) — and it is where Takaoka has cast metal for four centuries. Maeda invited seven founders here in 1611, and the town still makes the greater part of Japan's copperware, dōki (銅器): temple bells, incense burners, the bronze animals on shrine roofs across the country.

You can hear it if a workshop door is open, a dull ring of metal on metal. The best-known caster, Nousaku (能作), turns tin so soft it bends in your hands into baskets that hold their new shape, and its wares sit in shops along the lane beside heavier bronze. Prices run from a few hundred yen for a chopstick rest to well past ten thousand for a vessel. The houses became a nationally protected preservation district in 2012.

The Buddha you can walk up to

Back toward the station stands the Takaoka Daibutsu (高岡大仏), a bronze seated Buddha close to sixteen metres tall, finished in 1933 after the town's founders spent decades casting it. There is no ticket and no queue. You climb a few steps, and beneath the dais a dim gallery holds a scorched wooden Buddha head that survived the fire the bronze one replaced.

Locals will tell you it belongs with Nara and Kamakura as one of Japan's three great Buddhas, which is the kind of claim every town makes and no one adjudicates. It sits at a plain intersection, traffic passing at its feet, more neighbour than monument.

Merchant fronts and afternoon light

The Yamachōsuji (山町筋) quarter, between the Daibutsu and the station, keeps a row of dōzō-zukuri (土蔵造り) merchant houses — thick fireproof plaster walls, deep eaves, black and ochre fronts built by families who grew rich on trade. In the afternoon the west light rakes along them and the shopfronts glow. A few are open as tearooms and small galleries; most are simply lived in.

Takaoka is also the hometown of Fujiko F. Fujio, who drew Doraemon, and the Manyosen (万葉線) tram that leaves from beside Takaoka Station runs one car painted end to end in the blue cat. It costs a few hundred yen to ride out toward the bay. Children board it without a second glance; it is transit here, not a theme.

高岡の午後は、銅の匂いと寺の静けさでできている。

Getting there, and one mistake

From Tokyo the Hokuriku Shinkansen reaches Shin-Takaoka in about two hours forty minutes; from Kanazawa it is roughly twenty. The trap is that Shin-Takaoka and Takaoka are two different stations, one to three kilometres apart, joined by the short JR Johana Line — a three-minute local ride, but the trains are infrequent, so check the timetable before you leave the Shinkansen platform rather than after. Everything worth walking to clusters around Takaoka Station, not the Shinkansen one. Come on a weekday if you can; Zuiryū-ji before noon has the corridor to itself, and the copper lane wakes slowly, which is the right speed for it.