Kawagoe has no sea. It nevertheless has a row of eel restaurants, several of which have been in business for well over a century, clustered around the street of black-walled merchant warehouses that the town is known for. At midday most of them have a queue outside.

In the Edo period people here did not eat the meat of four-legged animals, and with no coast anywhere near, sea fish arrived rarely and expensively. Protein had to come out of the rivers. The town sits between the Iruma and the Ara, and by all accounts the clear water of that period held as many wild eels as anyone could want to catch.

Kawagoe was also a supply town for Edo, sending goods down to the capital. They went by boat on the Shingashi river, and that traffic was the town's connection to everything south of it. Rice, timber, sweet potatoes, and back the other way, money and visitors. A place where goods move is a place where people arrive, and arriving people have to be fed. The eel took that job and has not put it down.

A landlocked town whose speciality is a fish. Follow the reason back far enough and it is nearly always the shape of the ground. No coast, and two rivers. That is the whole of it.