Where to Stay in Kawasaki, Kanagawa

What is Kawasaki known for?

Kawasaki fills the ground between Tokyo and Yokohama, a component of the Greater Tokyo Area and of the Keihin Industrial Area, and that position accounts for most of what the city became. Visitor attractions follow the same logic. Kawasui Kawasaki Aquarium and Yumemigasaki Zoological Park work as city-scale days out, while the Electric Power Historical Museum and the Kawasaki Ukiyo-e Gallery split the difference between industry and art.

The old road left a hall of its own, the Tokaido Kawasaki Shuku Koryukan.

What are the main landmarks in Kawasaki?

Kawasui Kawasaki Aquarium is the headline. Yumemigasaki Zoological Park holds the other family day, while the Electric Power Historical Museum and the Kawasaki Ukiyo-e Gallery pull in opposite directions, one toward electricity, the other toward the woodblock print. The old highway has its own hall.

Tokaido Kawasaki Shuku Koryukan explains the post station, and Kawasaki Isago no Sato Museum sets the local record beside the burial mound at Mitsuike Kofun.

What is the history of Kawasaki?

Shell mounds came first. Long before any road ran through, people left the deposits recorded at Shōsenzukakaizuka and Tsurumi Shrine Shell Midden, and the excavated ground at Kamidai Site and Kamidai-kita Site adds to what the earliest settlement here can be shown to have been. Burial mounds followed them.

Mitsuike Kofun and Suwazaka Kofun remain as the graves of a later society, and Kawasaki Isago no Sato Museum is where that local record is set out. Kanagawa Prefecture holds the administrative frame around all of it. A post station changed the scale.

The Tokaido Kawasaki Shuku Koryukan carries the name of the post station that stood on the old road, and that traffic gave the settlement its first commercial reason to exist. City status arrived in 1924. Factories filled the ground after that, and Kawasaki became a working part of the Keihin Industrial Area, the belt of plants and works that runs through this stretch of the Greater Tokyo Area.

The Electric Power Historical Museum keeps the industrial thread, while the Kawasaki Ukiyo-e Gallery holds the print collection. Yokohama lies on one side, Tokyo on the other, and Kawasaki's history is bound to both. Both names still frame the city.

Where is Kawasaki?

Kawasaki covers about 143 square kilometres. Tokyo sits on one flank and Yokohama on the other, which leaves the city holding the middle ground of the Greater Tokyo Area, an urban strip rather than a town with countryside around it. Old ground survives inside it.

Mitsuike Kofun and Suwazaka Kofun are burial sites kept among the built-up districts, and the shell deposit recorded as Shōsenzukakaizuka speaks of a much older way of living on this ground.

What is the climate of Kawasaki?

Four seasons, no dry season. Kawasaki lies in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, which gives it hot middle months, a cool rather than severe winter, and rain spread through the calendar instead of concentrated in one stretch. Tokyo and Yokohama share the same weather almost exactly, since the three run together along one strip of the Greater Tokyo Area.

How do you get to Kawasaki?

The old Tokaido ran through here. Kawasaki sits directly between Tokyo and Yokohama in the Greater Tokyo Area, so arrival is a short hop from either, and most visitors reach it as a stop on a journey rather than as a destination in itself. Local transfers cover the rest.

Kawasui Kawasaki Aquarium and the central streets are the easy part, while Yumemigasaki Zoological Park and the Tokaido Kawasaki Shuku Koryukan take a further connection.