Ina, Saitama

The Nyu Shuttle runs quietly through the middle of Ina-machi, its elevated track cutting across the Kanto Plain with a matter-of-fact efficiency. Five stations thread the town together, and on weekday mornings the platforms fill with commuters heading south toward the main lines. This is the rhythm the town has known since 1983, when the line opened and the surrounding farmland began its gradual conversion into residential streets.

Before the housing estates, there were pear orchards and grape fields, and some of that agriculture persists — not as heritage display but as working cultivation on the Omiya Plateau, where roughly sixty percent of the town sits on flat, elevated ground. The Ayase River marks the eastern edge; the Haraichi Numagawa runs to the west. Between them, the land is level and open in the way that only the Kanto Plain can be.

The older layer of the town belongs to the Ina clan. Ina Tadatsugu served as the Kanto deputy administrator during the Edo period, and the remains of the Komuro domain estate still mark that history. The merger of Kobari and Komuro villages in 1943, then the establishment of the town in 1970, compressed what had been a slower agricultural timeline into a few decades. Now the Nyu Shuttle passes overhead, shinkansen lines cut through without stopping, and pears still grow somewhere between the apartment blocks — present, if you know where to look.