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AT&T Park in San Francisco has nothing on this place. There you have to hit the ball about 400 feet and clear a wall and rows of fans before you “splash down” in McCovey Cove.
At this baseball field, on the Arakawa River (荒川) in Tokyo, water is less than 250 feet away for a left-handed hitter. There are no walls or seats to clear. There were a couple of guys fishing in right field though.
This kind of Tokyo home is becoming harder and harder to find. I suppose Tokyo was loaded with these kinds of structures after the war. Most are now long gone, although some neighborhoods still have some clusters. The one pictured above was all by its lonesome, wedged between a gasoline service station/car wash and a bar. The location isn’t down some back alley in a shitamachi as you may expect. This home is right on Meiji Dori between Ebisu and Hiroo Stations.
I took today’s photo from a moving train on the way to Nikko back in February. The structure being built out the window was the Tokyo Sky Tree, which was less than 300 meters high at the time. Now it is up to almost 400 meters. When finished the Tokyo Sky Tree will be 634 meters high, surpassing the next tallest artificial structure in Japan by almost 300 meters.
Perhaps today’s picture works better with this quote than the photos I originally included with it. The train line is the Toden Arakawa Sen. The corner I took it from was Meiji Dori and Shin Mejiro Dori. The skyscraper in the distance is Sunshine 60 in Ikebukuro, once the tallest building in Japan.
A couple of Sundays ago we headed off to the Oedo Antique Market (大江戸骨董市) at the Tokyo International Forum near Yurakucho Station. We were a bit worried that we would have similar luck as when we tried to go to the flea market in Harajuku which was no more. I was expecting something like the flea market in Shinagawa, but this was totally different. Instead of mostly junk and cheap prices, this place had really cool, real antiques, with prices to match.
If you are interested, you can get there easily from a number of stations, including Tokyo Station, Hibiya Station, and Ginza Station. We exited at the Hibiya Station and hung out in Hibiya Park, listening to music and enjoying the fine weather. Things begin at 9 a.m. on the first and third Sundays each month. Some stalls were closing up at around 3 even though it is supposed to last until 4 p.m.
I have seen this curious building, above, several times (on Shinmejiro Dori, just west of Takadanobaba Station). On this day it finally looked ready for a picture with the blue sky and white fluffy clouds passing by.
This second photo is from the beginning of Walk #2. The Shakujii River was at my back and the Azaleas were in bloom.
I’m sometimes asked what has changed in Japan from when I lived here in the late 1980s. One of the biggest changes is the aesthetics of the apartment housing. I’m not sure exactly when this change came about, but once upon a time nearly all apartments in Japan (danchi or 団地) were made of white concrete. These still exist, as you can see in the above photo, but they are no longer made to look this way. Most, in Tokyo anyway, have been rebuilt with a more modern design (or at least the facade covering the buildings make them look more modern than the white cement which doesn’t age very well).
Not all go for the blue of today’s top photo, but they still look more pleasing than the endless, dirty-white housings of Japan’s past.