"What a So Tasty!"

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 for their size even the main thoroughfares can feel like bustling highways at some hours. This residential street connects a dense apartment zone and local park at one end with a shopping district at the other, making it one of the area’s more trafficked lanes. And it’s just that - a single lane on which commuters going both ways must contend for space, and at speeds which I never would have expected. At a glance, Japan’s narrow streets may appear dangerously disorganized. But that impression belies the underlying grammar with which people navigate these spaces, and which sets them apart from, say, the chaotic and unruly streets of India’s larger cities. Rules for getting around safely and efficiently in such small areas seem to be generally made up on the fly, though in watching other pedestrians and motorists I’ve noticed a few that persist for the most part. For instance, people walking tend to slip more toward the outside of the street, next to buildings, while bikes ride between them and cars on the street. Both bicycles and motorcycles drift between sidewalks/pedestrian-zoned edges of roads and the roads themselves, and tend to give walkers the right-of-way. Many people seem to ride the line between all-out rushing and responsible hurriedness but I have yet to see anyone behaving outright dangerously. There seems to be an air of mutual respect among people on the street who nevertheless just want to get to where they’re headed, but who often have to do so in very cramped conditions.

With people of all ages and types frequenting Japan’s dense streets, there appears a sort of microcosm of greater Japanese culture. It’s quite different in the US. While moving about in the public spaces of my primarily suburban existence there, few occasions arise in which I could easily commit a social faux pas. Quite simply, we’re each able to maintain our distance because of the car’s hold on American culture, and mostly don’t have to deal with social interactions on the street. The car, not the person, is the representative unit of an individual out grocery shopping, etc., and as such the nuances of filial piety one might find in equivalent circumstances in Japan have no place where everyone appears equal.

I learned the embarrassing way to acknowledge the social strata of older people on Japanese sidewalks when one challenged my spot on a sidewalk. Riding the left side of the sidewalk, I believed I was safe from social error because this is the way roads here function, and because it seemed to be the default side for most other pedestrians. However, an older man believed differently and, moving from his left side to my left side, he maintained his course and rang his bell furiously (if that’s possible) as if to say I’d been in the wrong. Perhaps he was drunk, or just wanted to take out some anger at a gaijin, but since then I’ve automatically given the right-of-way to older folks out of the respect they deserve, which I’ve seen others doing as well.

The manners organizing the chaos of the road seem to extend outward as well into neighborhoods and other public spaces. For one the almost absolute lack of litter in Hirakata and elsewhere attests to the respect for public spaces in the Japanese mindset, but other considerations speak even more to its deepness.

For instance, shrouds around construction projects help shield the rest of a neighborhood from these eyesores. They aren’t limited to neighborhoods, though, as I’ve seen them on any building under construction. They speak to what I feel is another instance of consideration for one’s neighbors and for the sanctity of public space. In a country with such limited space, it’s understood that not abusing it but acting as if it’s one’s own property makes it the most useful and pleasant for everyone. This seems to be the case as well with the tiny local park (at the end of the street in the first photo) which has been in use by at least 5, and around as many as 30 locals on the many occasions and times of day I’ve visited it. People walk their dogs, run, stretch, eat, play music, read, and bring their children to use the slides and water-squirting attractions nearly round-the-clock.