Catch-up #5: Kawagoe (Little Tokyo)

Kawagoe is called Koedo (Little Tokyo). It's where the castle of the Tokugawa family and is the reason I wanted to visit. Plus it's supposed to be a city that preserved the architecture of old Japan. History fact: b/c Kawagoe was so prosperous in its time, the merchants were able to built the homes and warehouses out of fireproof material instead of the commonly used dry wood. So it didn't burn down like a lot of the structures of Japan.

Kawagoe's trademark food? The sweet potato. They put sweet potato in everything. Of the things I tried, there were sweet potato ice cream, sweet potato popsicle, sweet potato chips, and sweet potato cake. I have to say I really liked the ice cream.

Throughout my personal exploration, I kept wondering where all the tourists were. This was a tourist location, after all. The thing was, the tourists were the smart ones. They were taking busses to all the sites. I was walking. It's quite a bit of a walk. But I did prefer it. You see so much more when you're on your feet. I took a lot of shots of streets and local architecture, but I'm just going to share these few (there's too many for me to want to upload it all).

One of the many temples I saw (I forget which one this is).


A sidestreet I thought looked really cool.

The Kawagoe Castle called the Honmaru Goten. It didn't look like much, but you could wander around inside of it for the very cheap price of 50 yen.

A shrine at the Kitain Temple.

The Gohyaku-Rakan Statues of the Kitain Temple. Technically, there are 538 ("gohyaku" means "500"). These guys are really small, but each one has a different expression. Unfortunately I couldn't get any closer. I arrived at the location right when they closed the gate (this picture was achieved by me holding the camera over the fence and blindly taking the shot).

The cool thing was a lot of the temples and things were connected to occupied areas. For example, one was part of an elementary school. Wouldn't that be cool going to school at an ancient temple?