Old school – Little Edo

While the sight of temples and shrines has now firmly lost the exciting appeal it had after first arriving in Japan (after all there is only so much you can take in before going a bit meh, kinda like churches in Europe), there is one thing I still thoroughly enjoy the sight of day in, day out: Japanese architecture. Though that might be a bit of a far reaching term, considering the architectural mish mash that actually consitutes most of Tokyo and the Japanese knack for knocking down old buildings and replacing them with crappy new ones (oh yeah and the earthquakes). Still I’ve always been a sucker for architecture in a way, not in a deep sense but just cos I like the shapes of buildings and just looking at streets and areas that are either old and quaint, or new and nice looking, or just weird looking like say Tokyo, or even Soho in London.

There’s also something about traditional Japanese houses, I don’t know what, but they do it for me. I think it’s the roofs, I really like them. The roofs are actually the only parts of temples I can still look at with any real interest as well. So it was lucky that we went to Kawagoe on our holiday this week, about 40 mins outside of Tokyo and nicknamed Little Edo (Edo is the old name of Tokyo), as it still holds traditional buildings and houses from the Edo period. Most of these seem to be clustered in one part of the town, which has now become a big shopping street (nice tactic there), and they make for a fascinating day out – not just because they’re old and traditional, but because you’ll find them alongside a variety of modern buildings, including red brick walls, fancy architectural nonsense and European buildings. All of which makes for a refreshing sight. And actually the shopping isn’t bad either, and the area is really nice.

In fact the entire town itself seemed pretty nice, with a definite feel that isn’t so different to modern Tokyo either – the whole old and new next to each other thing that Tokyo and most of Japan seems to have going for itself. The food is pretty nice too, we found a wicked soba shop that does cha-soba, or green tea soba. I think that may be a specialty of the area, not sure, but it’s well nice. And further proof that soba rocks plain and simple. Sweet potatoes also seem to be pretty big in Kawagoe: tempura-ed, baked, ice-cream-ed and also dressed in kimonos (check the pics to understand what I mean by that last one). We had tempura potatoes at lunch, and I got to admit while the idea of deep frying sweet potatoes in batter might sound totally wrong, it’s actually amazingly nice if heavy on the stomach.

Apart from the Little Edo part of town and some temples and parks, Kawagoe doesn’t seem to have much else going for it – not that that isn’t enough. Well actually it’s also got a Hard-Off shop, which has become my new favourite thing in the world. Part of the same chain as Book-Off (and a whole lot of other amusingly named -off variations), Hard-Off is basically a second hand hardware shop – which sounds pretty uninteresting. Until you factor in the fact that this is Japan, where electronic goods come out fast as you can think, and people are always after the latest thing because that’s what you do. Which results in tons of unused, but perfectly functioning and good hardware. Which is in turn where Hard-Off comes in, offering a veritable haven of electronic goodness. No matter what you’re after chances are you’ll find it there for a more than reasonable price. Video games and music seem to form the biggest part of it, with countless amounts of games, consoles and peripherals knocking on the shelves, while audio goods like turntables, amps, speakers, instruments and more are also in ample supply. There is actually a pretty good amount of choice (considering this is second hand), it all seems incredibly mint for the most part (their repackaging is pretty next level, like most packaging in Japan) and it’s also pretty cheap depending on what you’re after. And it’s not just recent models or new stuff either – you’ll find old models of hardware in incredible conditions and for silly prices. Oh and they also have boxes of cables, junk stuff (which has some incredible things in there: old 4 channels, multi track tape decks, video cameras for a 1 pound etc…), records, cds, videos and god knows what else. If you’re a bit of a modding, gear wiz I can see how this place could rightfully become a serious addiction. After we found the Kawagoe one and I went in looking for a new digi cam we ended up checking out the one near us too, and I’m now on a mission to do as many Hard-Off as I can considering the record bins…

Anyways as usual I took a bunch of pictures, which illustrate my whole point about buildings. So please have enjoying:

Kawagoe day out on Flickr