Fukaya

Fukaya is a city in the far north of Saitama Prefecture in Japan, on the border with Gunma Prefecture. It lies on the flat Kantō plain between the Tone River and the Arakawa River, and it is best known for Fukaya-negi, a variety of welsh onion that gives the city its agricultural fame, along with tulips and a long-established brick manufacturing industry. A castle was built here by the Uesugi clan in 1456, and during the Edo era Fukaya-shuku was a prosperous post town on the Nakasendō highway with more than eighty inns. The modern city took shape in 1955 when the town merged with several villages and was raised to city status, and it grew again in 2006 by absorbing the towns of Hanazono, Kawamoto and Okabe. It has a humid subtropical climate, a stable population of roughly 229,000 as of early 2021 and is the birthplace of the industrialist Shibusawa Eiichi.