Kawagoe

We almost didn’t go. Kawagoe was a name on a list Lia had made, thirty minutes north of Ikebukuro, and on a grey Tuesday with rain threatening it seemed like the sort of place you save for a trip that never happens. We went anyway, mostly because the train was cheap and we had nothing better, and stepped out into a town that felt like Tokyo’s older, quieter cousin — the one who stayed home and kept the family furniture.

The street of black warehouses

The heart of Kawagoe is a single street lined with kurazukuri — thick-walled merchant storehouses built of clay and finished in near-black plaster, with heavy tiled roofs that curl up at the ends like eyebrows. They were built this way to survive fire, which is exactly why they’re still here: Tokyo’s own Edo-era townscape burned and rebuilt itself into glass and concrete, while Kawagoe, a prosperous merchant town that supplied the capital by river, simply endured. Walking it, you understand why people call the place Koedo, “Little Edo.” The wealth is legible in the walls. These were the houses of men who dealt in sweet potatoes and textiles and did very well out of both.

The bell that still keeps time

Halfway along, a wooden tower rises above the rooflines — the Toki-no-Kane, the “Bell of Time,” a three-tiered belfry that has told Kawagoe the hour for roughly four centuries. The one standing now is the fourth rebuild, raised after a great fire in 1893, but it still rings, four times a day, an electric mechanism now doing the work that a bell-keeper once did by hand. We happened to be standing beneath it when it sounded at noon, and I watched a whole street of people not react at all — the surest sign that a thing belongs. Lia said it was the plainest tower she’d seen in Japan and somehow her favourite, and I knew what she meant. It isn’t grand. It’s just faithful.

Candy Alley

Behind the main street runs Kashiya Yokochō — Candy Alley — a short cobbled lane of shops that have made dagashi, cheap old-fashioned sweets, for generations. It smells, honestly, of childhood: burnt sugar, roasting soy, the caramel edge of freshly pulled candy. We bought far too much — sweet-potato crisps, glassy amber candy on sticks, a length of the longest, thickest fu-gashi I’ve ever seen — and ate it walking, like the schoolchildren the alley is really for. Kawagoe is potato country, and the sweet potato is everywhere: in the candy, in ice cream, in a purple soft-serve Lia declared the best thing we ate all day. I had the beer-flavoured one, which was a mistake, and hers, which was not.

Getting There

Kawagoe sits in Saitama, directly north of central Tokyo. From Ikebukuro the Tobu Tojo line runs to Kawagoe Station in about thirty minutes; the Seibu Shinjuku line reaches Hon-Kawagoe Station, closest to the old town, in around forty-five. From either station it’s a fifteen-minute walk or a short loop-bus ride to the kurazukuri street. It’s an easy half-day from central Tokyo — go on a weekday if you can, as weekends fill the warehouse street shoulder to shoulder.