It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood...

お父さん points out the neighborhood's boundaries.

Unlike the other Seminar Houses, nestled in the residential Katahokocho, Seminar House 4 is across the street from the infamous beer park, in the neighborhood of Kurumazuka – if it can be put into the category of 近所 at all.  Most neighborhoods have a sign on one of the 電子柱 (light poles), but お父さん, the live-in ‘father’ of Seminar House 4, wasn't sure whether we had one - Kurumazuka was only recently incorporated, he told me, just 5 years ago when the Kansai Gaidai main campus moved to its current Nakamiya Campus location.

So why is Kurumakuza was defined as a 'new' neighborhood, if, according to お父さん, 誰も住んでいません ('nobody lives here') other than a building full of short-term, international transplants into this mini-community?  Camera in hand, I set out to explore my neighborhood on foot, and discovered that I do have Japanese neighbors in Kurumakuza, even if they, like me, are not permanent residents.

Awaiting the number 12 bus.

My neighbors are part-time: an enthusiastically talkative obaa-chan awaiting the number 12 bus from Hirakata-shi Eki.  Normally she waits up the at the stop by きらら, but today (for some reason given in rapid Japanese that I politely responded to with 'そうですか’) she found it more convenient to wait outside Seminar House.

Further up the street, the cross-walk where Kurumazuka meets the surrounding neighborhoods bounds the site of late-night basketball for local youths (and the occasional international student), and beyond the courts, I discovered Makino Kurumazuka Koen, where locals can stroll with dogs on leisurely weekday mornings.  The park is, according to お父さん, built around the hill of an ancient tomb, from which Kurumazuka itself derives its name - an according sense of reverence pervades the space, or at least a desire for such respect.

My savior from the mosquitoes, diligently maintaining the tomb site.

I met another ‘neighbor’, a man sweeping the steps of the tomb.  Ever since he had first visited the site three years earlier and noticed the leaves littering the stairs, he has been coming daily to make sure the tomb and its surroundings are きれい.  He was also kind enough to point out that during the course of our interview, I was being eaten alive by the mosquitoes, and even did me the favor of swatting one that was making a meal of my left ear-lobe.

Washida-san at work.

Then there are Kiwamura-san and Washida-san, the two security guards who protect the permanent residents of the cemetery immediately next door to Seminar House.  From Kiwamura-san, I learned that this is the only cemetery in Hirakata-shi, so ultimately, every resident of the city, regardless of religion, is destined to become a member of the Kurumazuka community.  And provided that my understanding of Kiwamura-san's Japanese was accurate, the preparation for interment of the recently departed actually occurs directly across the way from the cemetery, in a building that I had previously assumed was merely municipal.  It's real function, as my limited Japanese allows me to interpret it, reveals a much more fascinating place within the social organization of the city as a whole.

The Kurumazuka cemetery, which I can only view from outside.

So, while it may be true that the only residential building in my neighborhood is full of foreigners, native neighbors are everywhere – working, strolling, playing, awaiting the number 12 bus, or even resting peacefully in carefully-maintained graves.  I have to conclude that the concept of neighorhood can encompass a place such as Kurumazuka, because it serves significant social functions and binds the greater community together, even if such a role is not immediately visible from the main sidewalk outside the Seminar House.  This is the virtue of visual anthropology - holding a camera, having the courage to make conversation in broken Japanese, discovering the underlying structure of the populated world around us.

Yomikata: Clouds-->Kanji-->People

Clouds: almost at eye-level from the bus...

...and unbelievably solid.

As I descend into Kansai International Airport, there seems to be more sprawling city, clouds, and sea than there is visible land – and what land there is to see juts up in surprisingly sharp ridges, the backbone of a geology completely different from any I have known.

Not your typical American lawn...

Even the clouds here are different – much lower and flat-bottomed, with a distant solidness that seems to invite the touch of the eye and the click of the camera.  The clouds, in fact, have continued to fascinate me long since my first landing – their proximity thrusts me into a Miyazaki film, and I hear the version of “Country Roads” from Whisper of the Heart swell in the background.  Likewise with the heat, the 蒸し暑い-inspired desire to constantly be jumping back in the shower after riding my single-gear bicycle up the hill to school.  The emerald fields of rice, sweet-smelling in the hot air, crammed in between curious, close architecture, are so unlike the sprawling lawns of the American suburbs.  My first instinct is to discard my former environment like a worn-out lover, to take up wholly with this beautiful, foreign, cinematic, clean, sweaty place – but how?

My first impressions of Japan reveal as much about me as about the country.  I am still a little 恥ずかしい, in love with the unique environment I have been allowed to enter, but unsure of how to understand the people whose daily existence is here.  Thus, this blog marks my first foray into formal anthropology.  Since my landing three weeks ago, I have moved beyond these immediate impressions of the weather and the landscape and the architecture, to begin to engage with the people who inhabit it.  I see the signs around me, and every day is a lesson in how to read them – both those written, literally, in Japanese, and the deeper meanings written in the Japanese people themselves, in the way they interact with each other, their environment, with me.

Light to capture...

...kanji to read...

...people to engage.