A bell still tells the time here, several times a day, from a wooden tower that has no other function. Ichibangai in Kawagoe is lined along one side with kurazukuri merchant houses: black plaster, heavy fireproof doors, each one slightly different in the way a row of solutions to the same problem is different. The look was not chosen. After the great fire, the merchants who could afford to rebuild in fireproof storehouse construction did so, arriving separately at the same conclusion. What reads today as a coherent streetscape is the record of a shared bad year.

Beside the bell tower a lane turns off into Kashiya Yokochō, the confectioners' alley, where the street width drops by half and the smell of boiled sugar reaches you before the shops do. Kawagoe was designated an Important Preservation District in December 1999, but the shops did not close for it and did not reopen after it; there is no gap in the trading. Three railway lines — Tobu, Seibu and JR — put central Tokyo forty-odd minutes away, and rents are correspondingly high. This is a tourist town and an ordinary commuter town occupying the same buildings at the same time.

Towns described as kura towns exist all over Japan, and most of them are quieter than this one. Kawagoe's difference is population. Ordinary life sits immediately behind the visitor street, close enough that five minutes after buying sweets in the alley you are walking under somebody's laundry. The switch is abrupt and nobody has tried to smooth it out. That abruptness is what keeps the district legible as a place still in use rather than a place kept, and it is why the bell reads as a clock rather than as an exhibit.