Sayama, Saitama

The tea fields come before you expect them — low, dense rows of *Sayama-cha* running along the plateau between the Musashino upland and the Iruma River. This is Sayama, a city in southern Saitama that grew steadily outward from Tokyo in the postwar decades, filling the terraced land above the Iruma with housing and commuter rail lines, yet holding onto the tea cultivation that gives it a particular local gravity.

The Iruma River moves through the center of things. Its banks have shaped the city's layout since the days when this corridor carried traffic along the Kamakura Kaidō Kamidō route and the Irumakawa-juku served travelers moving between domains. The river remains a reference point — not dramatic, but present, the way a main street is present in a market town.

At ground level, the rhythm is suburban and unhurried. The Seibu railway lines thread through, and the area around Sayama-shi Station has been rebuilt with a tidiness that comes from deliberate planning rather than organic accumulation. In a shop or at a market stall, you might find *sayama matcha "Meishō"* or a jar of *sayamaccha purin* — small, specific products that carry the region's tea identity without ceremony. The *Sayama Ōchakai* festival turns that identity into a public occasion, briefly. Otherwise the city continues its weekday pace, the plateau quiet above the river.