Saitama Audioguides

Saitama city was created in 2001 through the administrative merger of three old cities: Urawa, Omiya, and Yono. Each came with its own deep personality. Urawa was a posting-town on the Nakasendo highway during the Edo period, famed for its unagi (freshwater eel) restaurants that fed travelers heading to and from Edo, and some of those eel restaurants have been in continuous operation for over a century. Omiya took its name from the great Hikawa Shrine, whose forested approach along a 2-kilometer-long zelkova-lined avenue has been a place of worship since the 8th century. Yono was the quieter administrative center that held them both together.

The Omiya Bonsai Village, established in the mid-1920s when Tokyo bonsai masters relocated after the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, remains one of the most concentrated collections of bonsai expertise in the world.

About 30 bonsai nurseries and the Omiya Bonsai Art Museum cluster in a residential neighborhood where you can walk between gardens of centuries-old specimens, some of them older than the country's Meiji-era constitution. The Railway Museum in Omiya, opened in 2007, is probably the best railway museum in Japan, which in a country this serious about trains is not a trivial claim.