Iruma, Saitama

Tea fields cover a substantial portion of Iruma's land — not as a curated landscape but as working agriculture, the rows of *Sayama-cha* bushes pressing up against residential streets and train lines on the Seibu Ikebukuro Line. The soil here has been producing tea since long before the city took its current shape, and that continuity shows in small ways: a tea wholesaler's sign weathered to near-illegibility, a farmhouse with drying racks still in use behind a modern parking lot.

The deeper layers of the place surface in its quieter corners. Kōkuraji's kannondō, built in the Muromachi period and housing an eleven-faced Kannon, stands in a stillness that the surrounding housing has not quite erased. Nearby, the former Ishikawa-gumi Seishi Western-style building — a 1921 reception hall from the silk-reeling era — sits as a reminder that Iruma's economy once ran on threads rather than tea. Both structures have served as film locations, which says something about the particular quality of their silence. The Iruma City Museum, known as ALIT, holds the threads together, its displays tracing the arc from ancient Sue-ware kilns through the Edo-period post-town on the Nikkō Waki-ōkan road to the present.

Come autumn, the Iruma Mantō Festival lights the streets in a way that belongs entirely to this city rather than to any tourist calendar. The *Nishi-Mitsuki bayashi* percussion tradition, carried at Kaneko Shrine, keeps its own tempo alongside all of this — unhurried, practiced, locally owned.