Kawagoe

Kawagoe is a small town about 45mins by train from Tokyo, and is also known as Little Edo, since it was a castle town developed during the Edo period around the 17th to the 19th century. The castle itself doesn't exist anymore, but there are other structures from the period like temples and shrines. The main street is also lined with traditional warehouses designed in a style called karazukuri built in the late 1800s. Most of them are now occupied by shops and restaurants.

Plenty of pickles on sale.

You can have a tasting buffet here if you aren't pai seh.

All sorts of picked ume and daikon

I loved how the new buildings were designed in a modern interpretation of the old ones - with concrete panelling, aluminium window frames and huge glass openings. And how a rainwater downpipe can look so sexy.

One of the main attractions is the Candy Street where you can buy all sorts of snacks.

Candies for sale

Every imaginable sort of candy, biscuit and jelly was for sale

Even picked ume

The husband was particularly fascinated by this dark-brown baguette and insisted on buying one to try without knowing what it was, since so many people on the street were carrying one. It turned out to be a chestnut-flavoured bread with the texture of a meringue.

Senbei shop. Not the best photo but this was one of those shops where you just want to buy everything inside, and we were racking our brains thinking of people whom we wanted to get gifts for just so that we could make a purchase since everything was so pretty.

Weird-looking kiam chye skewers (咸菜串儿, anyone?)

Another senbei shop where they were toasting the senbei on site, and selling them wrapped up in nori to passersby

The fish-stuffed-with-redbean pancake

On the way back we passed by the Bell Tower, built in the 1890s to replace the original one built in the 1600s. I loved the design of the street lamps as well -simple and modern, yet incorporating elements of the past.

Unfortunately, with the preservation overlays, these small towns are subject to serious traffic problems particularly on weekends and holidays, when outsiders come and visit. There's no way to widen the road, and if the authorities were to cut out vehicular traffic altogether, it would also spoil the ambience of the town.

There are 2 ways of getting to Kawagoe: either via the Toju Tobu line from Ikebukuro, or via the Seibu Shinjuku Line from Shinjuku. The latter requires some walking from the Shinjuku JR station, but the Seibu line stops at the Hon-Kawagoe station which is a bit nearer the main part of town compared to the Kawagoe station, which the Tobu line uses. A one-way ticket costs around 480Y.