The Walk

Someone on flickr has been going through many of my old Japan photos. (Strange to think it was so long ago!) Following in their footsteps, I came across this photo.

I took this at night, obviously, probably mid-week, definitely after getting home from work at about eleven p.m. I took this on my walk to the gym--or perhaps I took this on my walk home (yes, alone) from the gym, which was usually between 12:30 and 1:30 in the morning.

Sometimes on the way there I would make a point of walking past the koban at the end of my street. (I liked to see the surprised look on the faces of the policemen there. They weren't used to seeing foreigners, much less seeing foreign women of the non-prostitute variety walk down the street late at night. I was also being somewhat needlessly cautious, wanting someone to have seen me, just in case.) Sometimes I took the shorter back way to the gym, wending through a maze-like part of Higashi-Mukojima, past a tiny park and a preschool and two shrines and a tofu shop and a pachinko parlor. I never, at that time of night, saw a single person at that hour if I took the back way. (If I took the slightly longer way past the koban, I could see as many as a few dozen people.)

I'd hit the gym (which was often surprisingly crowded), work out, then come home.  I would often stop for a snack (candy or fruit often) on the way home at one of the 24-hour convenience stores in my neighborhood and wouldn't get home until just before 2:00 a.m.

I miss my old neighborhood.