Saitama Hidden Gems

Saitama is where Tokyo's suburbs give out and the Chichibu mountains begin, and the two halves have almost nothing to do with each other. Kawagoe, half an hour from Ikebukuro, kept a street of kurazukuri merchant warehouses because a fire in 1893 destroyed the wooden buildings and the rebuilt clay-walled ones proved too solid to replace; the bell tower there has marked the hours since the seventeenth century. West of that, the Arakawa cuts into the hills at Nagatoro, where the riverbed is a shelf of exposed metamorphic rock that geologists have used as a teaching site for over a century. Chichibu itself sits in a basin ringed by peaks with a shrine that has run a December night festival of floats and fireworks for three hundred years. The prefecture is landlocked and low-lying in the east, which makes for the hottest summers in the country and is the single strongest argument for spending the warm months up in the valleys instead.