To the East

Of my apartment, that is.

One of the best things about the place I'm in now is the location. Besides being within walking distance of the best nightspots and shopping, there's really quite a lot of great scenery just outside my door. I sure will miss those walks through the neighborhood when I move.

The area is called Shitennoji. It's a somewhat ancient temple complex that has been fused with a zoo, shopping arcade, and a theme park (I told you they were everywhere). I say "somewhat ancient" because it was blown to bits in WWII and rebuilt, while the original structures would have been centuries old.

The temples themselves are the real treat. There's a great walk that connects them through back alleys and parks. It's best when the seasons change, lovely greenery. It takes the better part of a day to see them all, and unlike most of the hotspot temples, there are no entrance fees.

In my area are the memorial parks. Since the Japanese do Buddhist funerals, they cremate their dead, and their cemeteries have only headstones. It's strange to be in a graveyard with no dead people, totally not scary. No worrying about zombies popping out of the ground or grabbing at your ankles. For the Japanese, they're scared of ghosts. The tradition is to clean the headstone of one's ancestors and leave little gifts. Get lazy and their spirits come after you. One of my friends told me not to touch crumbling headstones because that person's family had obviously abandoned them, so the lonely ghost would chase me. So far, no hauntings.

The parks here are great. Not great as in fun, but great as they hold scores of bum houses. Japanese bums, like American bums, are usually wracked with alcoholism and mental disabilities. But for some reason these bums build really cool houses. We're talking walls, windows, doors, porches, electricty, water. It's like a real house, just made out of tarp, wood, and cardboard, and built in a park. They use a lot of car batteries too. I've even seen them have floors elevated on cinder blocks because the ground was uneven. Some of the places along the rivers have gardens where they grow their own vegetables. They still take their shoes off before they go inside too.