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.

Posted on June 15th, 2009 under Japan. Tags: japan links, Tokyo. Comments: None

I’ve previously mentioned some useful Japan and Japanese related websites. Most of them deal with learning Japanese. I’m now accumulating links that aren’t language related but will prove useful for someone living in Japan (since we will be doing so in less than four months). I’ll start with a few I know. If you have any to add to the list please do so as a comment to this blog entry.

Japan Train Route Finder allows you to enter your beginning and ending destination (in romaji). The site will then provide you with a variety of ways to get from Point A to Point B, including the fastest way and the cheapest way. We used this a lot on our trip in 2007. It saved us much time and money.

Weather Forecast (Tenki Yoho) is a Japanese version of weather.com. I suppose you can just use weather.com, but I like the Tenki Yoho site better. You can see the whole country at a glance, see how the day compares to averages, and learn Japanese weather terminology (if you can read some kanji) on Tenki Yoho.

Hiking in Japan is a blog with dozens of hikes listed in sufficient detail that you can actually get to the hike location (I hope). The hikes are sorted by prefecture or region so you can find hikes near your location easily.

Softbank’s inexpensive cell phone service is what we plan to use to call each other in Japan. For about $10 a month we can make free calls to each other. You have to purchase a Japanese cell phone though as foreign cell phones don’t work in Japan.

What links have you found useful?

Posted on March 8th, 2009 under Japan. Tags: japan links, Links. Comments: None