Sweet Potato Town

The planning for our 2025 Japan trip started way back in March of 2024 with a hotel reservation for eight nights in Tokyo. That hotel booking was quickly followed by a flight purchase to and from Tokyo's Haneda Airport just as soon as flights were available to bookend our hotel resy. Those two actions meant we'd be spending every night of this trip in one hotel in Tokyo. One hotel? For the whole trip? Yep, I know...it's rare for us. 

But one and only one hotel in Tokyo didn't necessarily mean we'd be spending every day in Tokyo. We wanted to explore a little beyond the city limits.

Our initial draft itinerary for this vacation had a few days with trips out of town. Mount Fuji. Nikko. And a walk in the woods somewhere north and west of the city to find some wasabi in the wild. But as we refined and refined the plan, gradually all those day trips fell away as we piled more and more Tokyo stuff onto our list. Eventually we were left with staying entirely in the city with just one-half day trip out to Yokohama, which we really considered to be part of Tokyo. I know it's not, but it sort of is in my mind.

Then at the last minute we decided our itinerary wasn't quite full enough and that we should stay true to our initial impulse and find somewhere a little bit further afield. For just one day. We picked Kawagoe, which we'd never heard of but which we found when paging through a borrowed Japan travel guide. The town (pronounced in Hopwood phonetics ka-WAH-go-eh) is about 90 minutes by subway and train from the hotel we had picked as our base of operations and seemed to have a few things that would hold our interest for a few hours.   

And so what's in Kawagoe? Well of course (and why would you expect anything different on this trip?) some temples and shrines (have to keep filling the goshuin-cho...) and some sakura. Let's face it, we weren't going anywhere on this vacation that wouldn't have a sakura or two or two dozen and we read that Kawagoe had a river towards the north end of town flanked by cherry blossoms on both sides. 

We also looked forward to a little shopping in an old part of the town that featured some historic warehouses (or kurazukuri) in a style of building that we likely wouldn't find too many other places in Japan. The kurazukuri date from a time in Japan's history when Kawagoe served as an important way station for goods all over the nation on their way to Tokyo. As commerce thrived, merchants from Kawagoe needed sturdy, fire-proof warehouses to store their valuable commodities so they built very expensive and very permanent buildings along the town's main street. These today are converted into various sorts of food and merch stores.

And in case you are wondering why I'm going shopping while on vacation, Japan is a Mecca of consumerism. They have the best stuff for sale there all over the place.

Kawagoe's Time Bell Tower. Keeping time and chiming since 1894.

And none of that was the biggest draw to Kawagoe for us. But let's not rush that. Let's spend a few paragraphs on the temples and shrines shall we? Or more accurately...one or two on one of each. Because we have to cover temples and shrines at least in a little detail. 

I wrote in an earlier post that we made an effort on this Japan vacation to curate our list of temples and shrines so we'd have something to remember each visit by. It's easier to remember a place with piles of daikon radishes all over the property than it is to remember a wooden temple or shrine hall with a wooden pagoda which you go see by walking under a wooden torii or two. And yes, pretty much all the temples and all the shrines in Japan are made out of wood.

If we had been hard-er core about temple and shrine visits on this vacation, we could easily have visited many more houses of worship in Kawagoe. But we figured two was enough when we found (1) a temple advertising 500 statues of buddhist monks and (2) a shrine that sold fortunes contained inside little red snappers that you have to fish for out of a bowl using a miniature fishing rod. That and a tunnel of ema, or prayer tablets, purchased and left at the shrine property so the prayers (I guess) have a higher probability of coming to pass. Assuming you believe that stuff.

The red snapper shrine (Hikawa Shrine) was worth a visit. We fished for (what is likely) a papier-mâché red snapper (it will now become a Christmas tree ornament, something it was NEVER intended to be), walked the tunnel of ema and made sure to check out Kawagoe's collection of sakura along the river (or was it more of a large stream?) just immediately to the north of the property.  We did not linger too long here. There's only so much fortune fishing you can do.

And no, we didn't feel the need to try to get one of each color of snapper (see below). Ours is the lighter color.

Hikawa shrine's basket of fish fortunes and tunnel of ema.

The temple was more memorable, although admittedly, we found nothing here to re-purpose as a Christmas tree ornament.

The temple we visited in Kawagoe is called Kita-in Temple. It was founded (it is believed) in the ninth century C.E. and like most good temples in Japan, it has burned down at least one or two times (I find references on line to fires that destroyed the place in 1202 and 1638). Remember the whole wood construction thing. Fire likes wood. Temples have burned a lot in Japan.

Sometime during the middle of the second millennium C.E., it became fashionable (and I'm probably overstating and dumbing down things here a little bit) for buddhist temples to acquire or commission a series of statues of Rakan, early disciples of the original Buddha who achieved full enlightenment and lived forever in a state of Nirvana. It started in the late 1600s in Tokyo and after that, other temples insisted on adding their own collection. Kita-in started working on theirs in the late 1700s and it likely took about 40 years to have them all carved.

They are pretty amazing. 

Find the sign on the temple property to the 500 Rakan; follow it loosely and imaginatively (it took us at least three attempts to find the statues); and you'll enter into a fenced enclosure holding row after row of robed figures in a variety of poses with a full range of facial expressions. Apparently no two are alike and I believe it. We didn't see any obvious duplication in our time checking out as many of the different figures and faces as we could. And I realize from the photograph above you can clearly see the temple's pagoda from the place where the statues site but I swear, it doesn't work the other way around. These things are concealed well.

While we didn't try too hard to check that there were no actual identical twins in the statuary, we  did spend some time finding a favorite or two and then leaving some yen in coin form next to some of our most beloved fellows. I picked a dude with a monkey on his lap (I know...always with the Year of the Monkey with me...) and the only figure I could find with a cup which of course I assumed held beer or wine or some other tasty beverage. He looked happy...what can I say? I'm thinking I could hang with that dude and try to get a little bit closer to enlightenment. Or something like that. I'd bring a cup too.

Oh...and apparently the sign is wrong. There are apparently 540 statues. We didn't count. Being in that space (and it was just the two of us), I felt remarkably connected spiritually to Japan and Buddhism. Sounds strange but it's true. There was a certain peacefulness to just moving between and around those figures. I'm sure the rain that kept everyone else away helped.

The Rakan with the monkey is in the bottom pic. See my earlier post for the dude with the cup.

But none of that was what made us visit Kawagoe. Don't get me wrong, that stuff all helped. But we picked Kawagoe because they are apparently renowned for their sweet potatoes. And Japanese sweet potatoes are certainly very special. Kawagoe is sweet potato town!

After we were done with visiting Kita-in and Hakawa and having seen the the town's famous wooden bell tower (yes, it burned down or was at least damaged by fire a few times) and the gorgeous kurazukuri warehouses, it was lunchtime. And there is all manner of sweet potato treats to be found in town if you look hard enough. Sweet potato fries. Sweet potato pudding. Sweet potato candy. Sweet potato noodles. Sweet potato with eel. Sweet potato ice cream. Sweet potato with chocolate. Yeah...we didn't have any of those things.

First bite? Sweet potato red bean paste buns. 

If you had told me 13 years ago before I started exploring places other than North America and Western Europe that I'd leap at the chance to eat some red bean paste and sweet potato enveloped by a soft and squishy and mostly tasteless rice dough called mochi, I would have said you were crazy. But that's what travel in general and Japan in particular has done to me. Red bean paste? Mochi? And sweet potato? And all freshly hot from the steamer? Yes, please.

So look...mochi red bean paste buns are a must have when you are in Japan. I don't mean a must have like durian in southeast Asia or Brennivin in Iceland kind of way. Not a rite of passage, I-can't-believe-you-just-consumed-that sort of thing. I mean these are genuinely sweet cravables. And add some thinly sliced sweet potato to add texture and extra sweetness. Good stuff! It disappeared quickly.

But what we really needed was a just plain roasted sweet potato. We found just that in one of the kurazukuri on the west side of the town's main street. Just sweet potato. No toppings. No gimmicks. No frills. No extra flavors. Just sweet potato. Roasted to perfection.

I don't know what it is about the sweet potatoes in Japan. I don't know if they just have better raw materials than we do here at home in the United States or what. But a simple roasted sweet potato eaten on the streets of some Japanese town or city is just mind-blowing. Ours were plucked out of the roaster, cut in half, dropped in a couple of pieces of custom-made cardboard and handed to us with a spoon in each half. The roast is so perfect that the flesh of the sweet potato separates from the skin with zero effort. And they are so rich and sugary that there is actual syrup to scoop out of the bottom of the skin. How on Earth do they do this?

What finishes off a good three mile or so walk complete with sweet potato lunch? Dessert, that's what. And I know what you are thinking...sweet potato ice cream? 

Naaaahhh. I already said we didn't have any of that. Dessert was sweet potato beer.

I will say that my past beer drinking experience in Japan has involved relatively straightforward, well-crafted and mild-tasting Japanese imitations of traditional German lager beer. And yes, the Japanese do it better somehow. So it was refreshing on this trip to have a glass or two of Japanese craft beer and there's no better place to get that in Kawagoe than at Coedo Brewery. They have a brewpub (or brew-restaurant is probably more accurate) near one of the two train stations in Kawagoe proper. 

This is not the first time I've had sweet potato beer (hello, Maui Brewing Company!) in my life. And to be clear here, this is probably beer that is brewed around or with sweet potatoes and not OF sweet potatoes. This one had body and thickness and taste and it was dark. What more could I want. Perfect end to the perfect (and only) day trip on our 2025 Japan trip. Kanpai!

Sweet potato beer (top). Kurazukuri (bottom).

There is one more and last thing I'll say about Kawagoe. 

Our walk from Kita-in to Hikawa took us down a ton of residential streets. Yes, you can get there by walking down the kurazukuri-lined street where we found our sweet potato treats but it's way out of the way. So we Google Maps-ed it and walked the shortest way we could down narrow streets and alleyways (some of the latter could have actually been some of the former). I swear I could have been walking through some small English town. I mean other than the obviously Japanese touches like the signs in kanji. 

It sounds crazy but I'll stick to my guns on this one. I think it was the tight streets; the tiny backed-in parked cars behind gates right on the street fronts; the overwhelming use of brick as a building material of choice; and the gardens. Especially the gardens. They all seemed to be super neatly kept and relied a ton on potted plants to add greenery, rather than flowers and other forms of greenery direct planted in the soil because, well, there's just not that much room for soil. Pots are more flexible.

How would I even make that connection? Well, I did live in England for 11 years and I still have family there and we have walked around the towns they live in a few times in the last dozen years or so. It's odd to say but the residential typology was remarkable similarly evocative. It was totally unexpected. 

I'm sure the rain helped. Rain always reminds me of England, especially when it's the type of rain that really makes you question if it's worth getting the umbrella out. We did.

So that's it. Kawagoe. Worth a train ride for a few hundred statues and some amazing, incredible, unctuous sweet potatoes. I don't know how they do it.

Last sakura picture on this blog from this trip. Kawagoe. Just north of Hikawa Shrine.