Waseda Walker
Yesterday I was surfing the internet to find out more about my future neighborhood near Waseda University. While I had previously used Google maps, I found Yahoo Japan’s maps to be more useful for finding out what cool things are within walking distance. My son, for instance, was thrilled to see dozens of Ramen shops less than a 10 minute walk away from our future apartment.
I noticed a Shinto shrine just a stone’s throw from our apartment that I wanted to investigate. So I googled 天祖神社 to find some pictures of it. While the shrine itself doesn’t look very impressive, I found a fantastic site, that had pictures of the shrine on it, to learn about my future home. The site is http://www.waseda-walker.com/ and it basically covers my entire future neightborhood. Imagine that! Someone created an entire website devoted to the history and culture of an area I’m planning to move to. My surprise was overshadowed only by my happiness.
On the front page of Waseda Walker it states, “日本でも有数の学生街として賑わう早稲田・高田馬場周辺の歴史と文化の足跡をたどりながら、この街の魅力を再発見していきます.” which, for those of you who can’t read Japanese, means something like, “Even for Japan, this place is known for its number of students; we’ll follow the footsteps of history and culture around Takadanobaba and Waseda and set out to rediscover the charm of this part of Tokyo.” Given that my apartment lies directly between Takadanobaba and Waseda, I was very pleased in the discovery of this site. I poked around for a bit and then sent the webmaster a brief email in Japanese thanking him for his site.
He responded today with a very nice reply, all in Japanese. I look forward to learning more from Hiroki San, the Waseda Walker, and in a couple of months walking the paths that he has researched and explained, seemingly for me, on his website.
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