December 2009
2 posts
changing impressions of Japan
6 months total living somewhere is not by any means enough time to plumb the full depths of a complex society like that of Japan. Though the linguistic boundaries have begun to fade, that fact will never obscure the glaring differences between Japanese culture and my own.
(Above, a man wearing a protective face mask waits through the Osaka subway stop that serves part of the city’s...
public acceptability in Japan
What’s considered publicly acceptable naturally varies from culture to culture and place to place. And just as Japan’s density - the topic of my last post - contributes to the feeling of a public space, so do what have over a long time become the embedded codes of public conduct. Granted, people behave differently here compared to people in the United States, but one shouldn’t...
November 2009
3 posts
on the Japanese urban landscape
The geographical landscape of Japan, from my recollection being upwards of 80% mountainous, means that any place we might call a city has to be built on only the remaining suitable land. In addition, it has to compete with the farmland required to sustain a population nearly half the size of that of the U.S. population, which is spread across an area more than 26 times as large as Japan’s....
Kurama Fire Festival - 鞍馬の火祭り
Late October, I had the fortune of being able to align my classes so as to attend the Kurama Fire Festival and experience the whole event, not having to return on the last train. Several friends and I arrived early enough to see the festivities begin, and spent the night near the shrine atop Kurama Mountain after the mass of other tourists had gone and the townspeople were beginning to clean up or...
Something about gender in Japan
Of course, there’s a lot to be said about Japan becoming “Westernized”, and almost as much to say about the effect on the perception of “gender” in Japan.
Japan has traditionally been a male-centered society, wherein females fulfill subservient roles in hierarchy dominated by men. I mean to place no value judgment on the observation that they’ve traditionally...
October 2009
3 posts
The Globalizing of Japan
In one little block of Hirakata I managed to find one of the most interesting manifestations of Western influence or… dare I say, worship, of the West? In the case of the murals in the following pictures, it’s both their content and sheer enormity, not to mention their simple presence I find worthy of some consideration.
For some reason it was found appropriate to plaster, next to a...
JR Namba street dancers
A few days ago I set aside a few hours to check out Osaka’s Namba district, and happened upon an interesting scene at JR Namba station. Young people came and went through the building’s front courtyard, stopping to watch themselves and others dance in front of the area’s several mirrored walls and a giant reflective ball in the center. I wonder whether JR might have intended to...
Tanuki
Spend a little time walking around any Japanese city and soon you’ll recognize the ubiquity of these little fellows:
“Tanuki” are easy to spot in front of restaurants, bars, various shops, and even homes. They come in many varieties, from the roughly half-human height of the old-style statue above, to tiny childlike Tanuki, to full human-sized statues like this one spotted in...
September 2009
2 posts
Neighborhood Hirakata
Not quite the average resident of Hirakata City, it’s very difficult to experience the more complex social phenomena occurring on the other side of the social and linguistic barrier. But observing the city from an anthropological perspective, some of the more fundamental principles of Japanese society are still easy to see.
My neighborhood’s roads aren’t particularly busy, but...
first impressions of Japan
If I were to post photos of the things that really impressed me upon first arriving in Japan, you’d probably see a lot of novelty quasi-English t-shirts, or shots of me throwing up deuces next to a beer vending machine. And if you could visually capture such abstract things as my profound exhuberance at being on an island on the other side of the planet - an incredibly beautiful one at that...