Giyoda, Saitama

The flat land stretches without interruption — no hills, no visible ridgeline, just the alluvial plain between the Tone and Ara rivers sitting barely above sea level. In this unlikely landscape, Gyoda built its identity twice over: first as the site of a dense cluster of large burial mounds that gave Saitama Prefecture its very name, and later as the town that once produced the overwhelming majority of Japan's *tabi*, the split-toed cloth socks worn under kimono.

The *tabigura* — the old warehouse-workshops where *tabi* were stitched and stored — still stand along certain streets, their thick-walled forms hinting at a manufacturing economy that ran at full intensity well into the twentieth century. The郷土博物館 at the site of Oshi Castle keeps the tools of that trade alongside埴輪 figures pulled from the surrounding mounds, a pairing that feels less incongruous than it sounds: both speak to a place that has repeatedly been the source of something larger than itself. The castle's reconstructed turret rises over what was once the scene of a siege by Toyotomi Hideyoshi's forces — a battle the defenders did not lose.

Out at さきたま古墳公園, the mounds rise from the plain with quiet authority. The museum there holds the *kinsakumei tsurugi*, an iron sword inlaid with gold characters, designated a national treasure. The さきたま火祭り and 浮き城まつり mark the calendar each year, keeping these two histories — the ancient and the industrial — in active circulation rather than sealed behind glass.