my city rhapsody
Feb. 5th, 2011 09:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nnozomi Have I said lately how much I love my city? It's the ugly sister among major Japanese cities--go to the travel guides section in any bookstore and you'll be lucky to find one book on Osaka for every twenty on Kyoto or Tokyo. And true enough, it doesn't have Kyoto's jewel-box beauty or Tokyo's everything-under-the-sun thrill. But for what I like best in cities, long meandering walks through ordinary streets, you can't beat it.
Today was a Saturday with no classes, a treat to be savored: I started out with an extravagant lunch at my favorite Thai place, and from there walked east in a long straight line. The gaudy raucousness of Shinsaibashi, usually a neighborhood I hate, seemed inoffensive and even pleasant for a change. In next to no time I was wandering among the old narrow streets and old-fashioned houses of Karahori, both one of the most traditional neighborhoods and recently a center of little fancy shops and artists' gatherings. Narrow winding streets are one of the features of Japanese cities I love the most (on a trip to Hokkaido some years ago, I found Sapporo, which was planned and built as a frontier city in the late nineteenth century, very logical and comprehensible and unutterably boring, with its wide straight grid pattern), and Osaka has more of these streets than anyone would suspect. Dominated in color by the dark, softly weathered wood of the houses, brightened by ceramic pots of flowers in front of nearly every house (yes, even in February), paved with old flagstones, sometimes too narrow for any passage but on foot, quiet but full of the obvious presence of family life.
On this stroll through, Karahori also supplied the two necessities of city walking as far as I'm concerned: snacks and books. A little doughnut shop yielded up a chocolate-topped doughnut for a dollar-fifty or thereabouts, which I ate ungracefully while walking down the street. A used bookstore ("sorry, we just moved in and it's not very organized yet") provided a pocket-sized atlas of the world, an old Harry Potter book (to reread once and donate to the school library), and a copy of the Nakamura Tomoko biography of Yuriko, pretty much the standard modern biography and useful to have at hand.
I hit the Loop Line at Tamatsukuri and walked north and further east along the line of the Hirano Canal. Lots of Korean names and Korean-disguised-as-Japanese names outside houses here, only fittingly, as they were the ones who built the canal by the sweat of their brows. More narrow streets in Nakahama, where I never pass through without seeing at least one group of elementary schoolers playing in the road; foreigners are still enough of a rarity around here that they sometimes stare, whisper and giggle. The big round tower of the water filtration plant, which would make wonderful apartments if they ever decided to remodel it, like the Gasometer complex in Vienna.
Up in Shigino, I passed a dusty little corner playground where an elderly lady was feeding six stray cats: black, black and white, tabby, and two elegant blue-eyed Persians, aristocrats down on their luck. She and I chatted companionably for a little while-- "You're not that half-Japanese girl from these apartments here, are you?" "Um, no, I live further north." I actually have been taken for half-Japanese from time to time, probably because people expect full-blooded foreigners to be blond, blue-eyed (like the Persian cats), and non-Japanese-speaking.
A large apartment complex--not municipal housing but a more lavish private version--caught my ear as I passed it with the unmistakable voice of Brahms. Slightly incredulous, I ventured into its tiny community hall and stood in the foyer for a while, listening through a closed door to Brahms' Second Symphony being rehearsed by a jaw-droppingly inept community orchestra. Now I belong to an amateur orchestra myself, and we (I myself in particular) are not always anywhere in the vicinity of professional standards, but these people were just awe-inspiringly bad. Having said that, I should add that, while I may be making fun of them, I'm not complaining; it's no skin off anybody else's nose how they may play, and they're doing it because they love it; that's a good enough reason, whether they suck or not. (I do wonder what moved them to take on Brahms, though.) And no matter what, it's neat just to be able to walk down the street and run into a random orchestra rehearsal.
A little while later, after passing the perpetual al fresco beer-and-snacks party that's one of the neighborhood secrets, I reached my destination--the station at Kyobashi--and, having walked somewhere from five to seven miles, took the train home.
Today was a Saturday with no classes, a treat to be savored: I started out with an extravagant lunch at my favorite Thai place, and from there walked east in a long straight line. The gaudy raucousness of Shinsaibashi, usually a neighborhood I hate, seemed inoffensive and even pleasant for a change. In next to no time I was wandering among the old narrow streets and old-fashioned houses of Karahori, both one of the most traditional neighborhoods and recently a center of little fancy shops and artists' gatherings. Narrow winding streets are one of the features of Japanese cities I love the most (on a trip to Hokkaido some years ago, I found Sapporo, which was planned and built as a frontier city in the late nineteenth century, very logical and comprehensible and unutterably boring, with its wide straight grid pattern), and Osaka has more of these streets than anyone would suspect. Dominated in color by the dark, softly weathered wood of the houses, brightened by ceramic pots of flowers in front of nearly every house (yes, even in February), paved with old flagstones, sometimes too narrow for any passage but on foot, quiet but full of the obvious presence of family life.
On this stroll through, Karahori also supplied the two necessities of city walking as far as I'm concerned: snacks and books. A little doughnut shop yielded up a chocolate-topped doughnut for a dollar-fifty or thereabouts, which I ate ungracefully while walking down the street. A used bookstore ("sorry, we just moved in and it's not very organized yet") provided a pocket-sized atlas of the world, an old Harry Potter book (to reread once and donate to the school library), and a copy of the Nakamura Tomoko biography of Yuriko, pretty much the standard modern biography and useful to have at hand.
I hit the Loop Line at Tamatsukuri and walked north and further east along the line of the Hirano Canal. Lots of Korean names and Korean-disguised-as-Japanese names outside houses here, only fittingly, as they were the ones who built the canal by the sweat of their brows. More narrow streets in Nakahama, where I never pass through without seeing at least one group of elementary schoolers playing in the road; foreigners are still enough of a rarity around here that they sometimes stare, whisper and giggle. The big round tower of the water filtration plant, which would make wonderful apartments if they ever decided to remodel it, like the Gasometer complex in Vienna.
Up in Shigino, I passed a dusty little corner playground where an elderly lady was feeding six stray cats: black, black and white, tabby, and two elegant blue-eyed Persians, aristocrats down on their luck. She and I chatted companionably for a little while-- "You're not that half-Japanese girl from these apartments here, are you?" "Um, no, I live further north." I actually have been taken for half-Japanese from time to time, probably because people expect full-blooded foreigners to be blond, blue-eyed (like the Persian cats), and non-Japanese-speaking.
A large apartment complex--not municipal housing but a more lavish private version--caught my ear as I passed it with the unmistakable voice of Brahms. Slightly incredulous, I ventured into its tiny community hall and stood in the foyer for a while, listening through a closed door to Brahms' Second Symphony being rehearsed by a jaw-droppingly inept community orchestra. Now I belong to an amateur orchestra myself, and we (I myself in particular) are not always anywhere in the vicinity of professional standards, but these people were just awe-inspiringly bad. Having said that, I should add that, while I may be making fun of them, I'm not complaining; it's no skin off anybody else's nose how they may play, and they're doing it because they love it; that's a good enough reason, whether they suck or not. (I do wonder what moved them to take on Brahms, though.) And no matter what, it's neat just to be able to walk down the street and run into a random orchestra rehearsal.
A little while later, after passing the perpetual al fresco beer-and-snacks party that's one of the neighborhood secrets, I reached my destination--the station at Kyobashi--and, having walked somewhere from five to seven miles, took the train home.
