Japan Canal Towns & Water Cities Coloring Book

About this book

Sixty real canal towns and water cities of Japan — and every one of them ready to color.

Before the railway, Japan moved by water. Rice, salt, timber and sake traveled by canal boat and coastal ship, and the towns that grew up on the water — warehouse canals, river ports, ferry landings, castle moats and spring channels with carp in them — still carry that working waterfront in their streets. This book sails that network from Hokkaido to Kyushu, and every stop is a real place in its real view: the stone warehouses of the Otaru Canal at dusk, the red-brick wharves of Hakodate, Nihonbashi where every road in Japan began, the moats and canal grid of Edo, the boat landings of Kawagoe and Tochigi, the brick aqueduct of the Lake Biwa Canal marching through a Zen temple garden, neon doubled in the night water of Dotonbori, the twin arches of Nagasaki's Meganebashi, and the carp drifting in the street channels of Tsuwano and Shimabara.

Every subject appears as a two-page spread: on one side, a full-color guide — a photograph of the place today, or the public-domain Edo-period print that made it famous — with a short, fascinating story of the town, its water and its trade, and exactly how to color it; on the other side, a detailed coloring page of the very same view, converted from the real image so the scene you color is the scene itself.

Inside you will find: • Hokkaido and Tohoku — Otaru Canal, Hakodate's Kanemori warehouses, the Kaiyo Maru at Esashi, Aomori's bay bridge, the morning market quay at Hachinohe, Akita's old port of Tsuchizaki • Edo and the Kanto water towns — Nihonbashi, Fukagawa's canals in period prints, the Kanda River at Ochanomizu, Yokohama's Hikawa Maru, the Uzuma River storehouses of Tochigi, boating on Kawagoe's Shingashi River, the swan boats of Lake Senba • The Tokai and Hokuriku coasts — Nagoya's Horikawa and Nakagawa canals, Ogaki's river port, Ise's Kawasaki storehouse district, the Uchikawa canal of Shinminato, Kanazawa's Kuratsuki canal, the red-brick ports of Tsuruga and Maizuru • Kyoto, Osaka and Kobe — the Suirokaku aqueduct, the Takase River, Dotonbori by night, Nakanoshima between two rivers, Meriken Park harbor • The Inland Sea, Shikoku and Kyushu — Onomichi's channel, Kure's naval wharves, the stone quay of Misumi West Port, Tokuyama's factory harbor, the carp channels of Tsuwano and Shimabara, Meganebashi and Dejima in Nagasaki, the Wakato Bridge over Dokai Bay, and the Sakurajima ferry at Kagoshima • 60 full-color guides with the story of each place (85–97 words each) • None of these sixty subjects appeared in our previous Japan coloring books

Sixty towns of the working water, one long voyage from the snows of Hokkaido to a volcano in Kyushu — bring pencils, and take your time.

Written and created in Japan by Japanese author Aki Wakamatsu. Published by Takikawa TOKOTOKO Kids LLC, a Japanese publisher in Hokkaido, Japan. Authentic Japanese content, carefully made in Japan — not mass-produced.