Where to Stay in Saitama, Saitama-ken

What is Saitama known for?

The Urawa Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art hold the painting collections, while the Saitama Municipal Youth Astronomical Museum turns its dome on the night sky above the plain. Ramen has its own hall. Eaters queue at the Musashi-Urawa Ramen Academy, and the Kōnuma Folk Museum keeps the field tools and household gear of the countryside the wards were laid across.

Urawa still sets the tone.

What are the main landmarks in Saitama?

Saitama gathers its landmarks in Urawa and the wards immediately around it. The Urawa Art Museum and the Museum of Modern Art hold the painting collections, and the brick front of Saint Theresa of the Child Jesus Cathedral rises a few streets away. A dome watches the sky.

The Saitama Municipal Youth Astronomical Museum runs its telescope for school groups, while the Kōnuma Folk Museum keeps the tools of the farming plain the city was built across.

What is the history of Saitama?

Saitama took its present form in 2001, when the older towns of the plain were joined under a single name. Urawa was the elder of them. That town carried the prefectural offices and the galleries, and its name still marks the stations, the museum streets and the cathedral parish on this side of Saitama-ken.

The merger did not erase the older names. Wards and stations kept them, and so did the shopfronts along the arcades. Before any of it, this ground was farmland.

The Kōnuma Folk Museum keeps the tools and household gear of the villages that worked the plain, the record of a countryside the wards were laid across within a couple of generations. Paddy and dry field gave way to housing plots. Rail lines pushed the built-up edge outward until the blocks ran unbroken toward Warabi, Kawaguchi and Koshigaya, and the boundary between one town and the next stopped being visible from the street.

Museums followed the merger. The Museum of Modern Art and the Urawa Art Museum drew the painting collections together, while the Saitama Municipal Youth Astronomical Museum opened its dome for the schools of a city that had only just acquired its name. The old towns outlast the boundaries redrawn over them.

Where is Saitama?

Saitama lies on the flat inland plain of Saitama-ken, in Japan, with no coast of its own. The land lifts hardly at all. Rivers cross it in shallow beds, and the built-up wards run into Warabi, Kawaguchi and Koshigaya with hardly a break, so the edges of the city read as administrative rather than physical.

Urawa sits toward the southern side. Open fields of the kind the Kōnuma Folk Museum records begin again past the outer wards.

What is the climate of Saitama?

Saitama sits too far inland for the sea to temper it. Summer settles heavy and still across the plain of Saitama-ken, the warmth holding through the night in the built-up blocks around Urawa, while the winter months turn dry and bright with hard frosts and very little snow. Rain arrives in early summer.

Autumn clears the sky over the dome of the Saitama Municipal Youth Astronomical Museum, and spring runs short and warm.

How do you get to Saitama?

Saitama stands on the rail corridor that runs north across the plain, and both Urawa and Musashi-Urawa take intercity services. Musashi-Urawa is the crossing point, where the orbital tracks cut the north-south line and passengers change without leaving the platform. Trains come constantly.

Local services thread out to Warabi, Kawaguchi, Shiki and Koshigaya, and the expressways over Saitama-ken bring in the coaches and the cars from the same directions.