sechan19 | Public Space.

On Sunday I had plenty of free time so I once again put on my boogie shoes and set off for adventure. I'd done some internet searches on my town of Yamato-shi (which is actually a city, and a pretty big one at that) to try and find interesting places to visit. I hit paydirt with the Tsurumai-no-Sato Museum of Historical Artifacts, a tiny one-room exhibit hall devoted to the history of Yamato-shi from 70,000 BCE on.

Even though the museum is in my city, I had to take two train lines to get there. My daily Odakyu line to the Chuo Rinkan station, and then the Tokyu Denentoshi line to Tsukimino station. Tsukimino station is in the schwanky part of Yamato-shi. The houses there were large, most with huge gardens and BMWs in the covered driveways. Very upscale.

It was nice to break out of the box, subway-wise, and test myself against a new route. I also spent extra time in the Tsukimino area walking around looking at houses, parks, and posters. Toward the end of my walk I ran into a couple of Japanese men who were putting up a poster for a local political candidate (some kind of city official post is coming up for election in the next week). They said "hello" to me and smiled in a way that indicated a bit of pity that was amusing. For a traditional Japanese man, a young woman alone - with no one to watch out for her - is an object of sympathy not of admiration.

Back in my part of Yamato-shi, I decided to walk in a different direction from the train station and found an absolutely gorgeous city garden space. A long, cobbled walk ran between two long garden planters. They were filled with trees and flowers, stones and boulders, and periodically gave way to water fountains. In the bricking at the base of the planters were pictures done by local students, ranging from the clumsy to the intricate, on any number of subjects and topics.

Being in this little space, carved out between the factory and the hospital and the train station and a plethora of stores and apartment buildings, really made me appreciate the Japanese sense of civil building. Yamato-shi covers an area of about ten miles, and it has a population of over 200,000. It's located in Kanagawa Prefecture - Japan's fifth smallest of forty-seven total by area and third largest of forty-seven by population. That's a lot of people in a small space, and the high rise apartment buildings and splitting of one house into four-family living spaces attests to that.

And still they make room for open nature spots where people can go on the weekends to socialize, reflect, and just plain be outdoors.

That's so wonderfully brilliant.