Saitama

Kawagoe in the Evening

Thirty minutes from Ikebukuro is a street of clay-walled merchant warehouses that survived the fires Tokyo did not. The coaches leave at five. Everything good about the place happens after that.

A street of dark clay-walled merchant buildings lit by lanterns at dusk — Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

Kawagoe was the merchant town that supplied Edo, and the fireproof clay-walled warehouses its traders built — heavy tiled roofs, black plaster, iron shutters — are still standing in a single street. Tokyo lost its own to fire, earthquake and war. This is the nearest thing to seeing what the capital's commercial streets actually looked like.

It is also thirty minutes from Ikebukuro, which means it fills with day visitors between eleven and four, and empties completely by six.

At a glance

Getting there: 30 minutes from Ikebukuro, or 45 from Shinjuku. No reservation needed
The street: Kurazukuri-dori, about 400 metres of warehouse fronts
Best hours: After five, or before nine in the morning
The bell tower: Rung four times a day; the lanes behind it are the quiet part
Local speciality: Sweet potato, in every form a confectioner can think of

The street empties at five

A wide street of old merchant buildings at dusk with lanterns lit along it — Half past six in August. The same street at two in the afternoon is shoulder to shoulder.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

The shops close between five and six, the coach parties go, and the street lights — which are deliberately low and warm — take over. For about forty minutes the buildings look the way they were built to look, lit from the front and dark behind.

Dark wooden and plaster buildings along a street at twilight — The plaster is lime and soot, built up in layers over a timber frame — fireproofing, not decoration.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

What the buildings are

Close view of a merchant building with heavy tiled roof and iron shutters — The roof tiles and the iron shutters are the fire defences. The cost of one of these buildings was roughly that of a small ship.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

Thirty-odd kurazukuri warehouses survive, most built in the decade after an 1893 fire that destroyed a third of the town. They are shops now — knives, sweets, textiles — and several keep their original interiors, which you can walk into for nothing during opening hours.

A rickshaw waiting on a street of old wooden buildings — The rickshaws work the daytime trade and are gone by six.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

The lanes behind

A quieter old street with a postbox and low wooden buildings — One street back, where the postbox and the shutters have not been restored for anybody's benefit.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

The main street is the photograph; the lanes either side are the town. Candy Alley, the little shrine courtyards and the backs of the warehouses are all within three minutes' walk, and are empty at any hour.

An old street at blue hour with warm interior lights showing through lattice fronts — August, about twenty past six.Kawagoe, Saitama · July 2025

A practical evening

Arrive at four. Walk the main street while the shops are open, eat early — the sweet potato is not a gimmick, it is genuinely the local crop — and then spend the blue hour walking the same four hundred metres again with the lights on.

Trains back to Ikebukuro and Shinjuku run until late, so there is no reason to rush. If you want the kimono photographs that fill Instagram here, the rental shops are near the station and close at six, which means doing that first and the evening second.