Tokyo may be big, but it's not big on history. The city's most popular historical spot, Asakusa, is centered on Asakusa Kannon temple, and its main hall was built in 1958. Frank Lloyd Wright's sublime Imperial Hotel survived the onslaughts of the 1923 earthquake and 1945 fire bombing, but didn't survive the onslaught of postwar urban planning.

Those seeking real history near the capital might find it in the baroque excesses of Nikko. Or they could go to Kawagoe in Saitama Prefecture. Situated just 40 km from the center of Tokyo, Kawagoe is fond of referring to itself as "Little Edo," taking its sobriquet from the old name for Tokyo.

As Edo began to prosper from the beginning of the 17th century, so did its little cousin just up the road. Kawagoe developed as a commercial base supplying goods and materials to the shogun's burgeoning capital. And like the merchants in the big city, those in Kawagoe took to building the plaster-walled storehouses called kurazukuri, similar to the ones then in vogue in Edo. Heavy-set and mud-colored, kurazukuri may be no one's idea of elegance, but they are eminently practical -- and fireproof. When a great blaze ravaged Kawagoe in 1893, the houses of the common people went up like tinder, but many of the town's kurazukuri remained intact.