Katsushika, Tokyo

Along the covered shopping street that leads to柴又帝釈天, vendors sell 和菓子 from wooden trays, and the smell of steamed rice dough drifts past the awnings. The street is narrow enough that two people with bags must angle past each other. This is Katsushika — a ward pressed between the 荒川 and the 江戸川, where the flat geography of the old 下総国 still feels present in the low rooflines and the wide sky above the river embankments.

The district carries two fictional shadows that have become physical fact. At 亀有駅, fifteen bronze figures from the manga 『こち亀』 stand at corners and intersections, absorbed into the ordinary flow of commuters and shopping bags. A few stations away, the 葛飾柴又寅さん記念館 reconstructs the world of 『男はつらいよ』 in careful detail, including the 山田洋次ミュージアム alongside it. Neither site feels like a museum in the distancing sense — both open directly onto streets where the same rhythms continue.

Underneath the popular-culture layer, older textures persist. 堀切菖蒲園 traces its iris-growing culture to the Edo period. The 金町浄水場, its intake tower rising from the 江戸川, has been operating since the early twentieth century and has appeared in films and manga alike — a working structure that became image without trying. The 葛飾区郷土と天文の博物館 holds both local history and a planetarium, an unlikely pairing that somehow fits a ward accustomed to holding contradictions quietly.