Neighborhood Hirakata

For this post I chose to narrow "my neighborhood" down to the level of cho/machi, just like Bestor did in his movie Neighborhood Tokyo as well as his chapter in the course readings*.

(Click the pictures to enlarge)

In most ways, Katahokohigashimachi can pass for a typical Japanese neighborhood. I am am not certain of the actual size of the area, since I do not know how the "neighborhood-borders" are drawn, yet you can get an idea of the size when looking at a map of this and the surrounding neighborhoods. But even though our neighborhood has a lot in common with typical Japanese ones there is one major difference: 

Us.

Three of the four seminar houses of Kansai Gaidai are located in Katahokohigashimachi, which means that several hundreds of us foreign exchange students live in this fairly small neighborhood, making it highly untypical as far as neighborhoods in the area go.

According to CIA's World Factbook, 98.5% of the people in Japan are ethnically Japanese. With these numbers in mind it is easy to see how our neighborhood contrasts against "typical" neighborhoods. Of course such a big population of foreign youths will lead to some kinds of consequences for the neighborhood. We are of a multitude of different cultures, look different, and behave in different ways. There is also the risk that some of us not always will behave in the best of ways. This is something that can result in a negative picture of foreigners in Japan and we should all do our best to prove such a picture false and at the same time contribute to an even better atmosphere in our neighborhood.

As stated above, I am not really sure of what is actually considered a part of our specific machi but that put aside, I have chosen to show some of the more characteristic elements in our nearby surroundings. 

Kurumazuka Park is possibly the most central part of the neighborhood. People jog here, walk their dogs, families and groups of children play, and I have heard (but not yet seen for myself) that on some early mornings people get together for some sort of choreographed group exercise.

Right across the street from the park is a liquor store, a few restaurants and other businesses located. There are also the regular vending machines for drinks, but also for beer and cigarettes. During orientation, Prof. Tracy told us that drinking alcohol in public is considered poor manners, and the beer vending machine located right at the park near the seminar houses provides ample opportunity for foreign students to look bad.






*Theodore C. Bestor: Inquisitive Observation: Following Networks in Urban Fieldwork

Early impressions of Japan

Since the very moment I arrived at the airport, I have consistently gotten new impressions of Japan. Maybe not at quite the same furious pace now as I did during the first week or so, since I am beginning to grow accustomed to some of the things that really struck me as different in the beginning.

One of the first impressions was that tradition and history seem to be so well represented everywhere in society even today. On my way to school, I pass a number of different shrines and also several beautiful traditional Japanese gardens. And this for me is something exotic, that this industrialized and technologically developed country still has such a strong connection to their past. What is even more fascinating is how these things are seen alongside modernities in the melting-pot of contemporary Japan.

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I think that this picture quite clearly shows an example of this impression.

A traditionally pruned tree, right next to a Coca-Cola vending machine.

Another early impression is one that I, in a somewhat greater sense, expected before I first got here: the lack of space and how it is in some places extremely noticeable. Some of the streets among the houses in the neighborhood look like bicycle- or walking-roads, but they are actually driven upon by the cars of the people living there. Many of them are extremely narrow (and crooked), and I still wonder how a situation with two cars meeting in some of the narrower passages would be handled. Even though many of the cars are small as well, they wouldn't be able to pass side by side in some areas. Streets and cars are not the only things that are small; many of the houses I have seen are small and most of them are extremely close together, in some of the cases cramped like in the picture below, where the walls are almost scraping against one another.

(click to enlarge)