Over the Distance

[dr4b]

Hmm, work went really well today, all things considered. I woke up with a horrible headache and my stomach hurt a lot -- I blame eating "Cup Of Noodles" for dinner last night -- but somehow I got to work, hung out with Eri, taught some classes and generally smiled and laughed a lot with people. My final class of the day was on "expressing opinions", and it was only one student, and so we sat around talking about the Hanshin Tigers and baseball stuff for an hour and a half. Good times. ("How do you feel about Kei Igawa?" "In my opinion, he shouldn't have left." "What do you think of Johnny Damon?" "I think he throws like a girl." "Sorry, what?" "Let me explain...")

I ate a lot of food after work though -- went to McDonald's because I was starving and needed something fast at 11pm, and then got taiyaki from a random old lady with a yatai outside Akabane station, and then decided I needed to get exercise, so rather than just riding my bike home, I went for a longer ride.

You'd think I should be afraid of riding my bike long distances at night now, but I decided to avoid Sangyo Doro (the big road I was hit by a truck on) and just ride down the Road Formerly Known As Sun Road Once You're Outside Warabi until I either hit another train line or hit a river or something. I basically ended up in Hatogaya City, and turned around when I reached a big bridge, at a corner with a Saizeriya, a Matsuya, and the unfortunately-named Hard-Off store, where they sell used hardware and such.

Being as Japan streets don't have names and explaining where ANYTHING is is a royal pain in the ass, I decided to have some fun with Google Maps:



Warabi station, the red dot, is where I get off the train when I come home from work. The dark blue dot is my apartment, about a mile away. The purple dot near the bottom is the intersection near Nishi-Kawaguchi where I was hit by a truck two weeks ago (maybe a mile from home). The orange dot near the top right is the Kawaguchi Municipal Medical Center, which is the hospital the ambulance took me to. And the aqua dot is where I rode my bike to tonight, which oddly doesn't look nearly as far as I thought it was. I've ridden further, although usually I had some clue where I was going; this time I was just riding and looking around the area to see what was there.

I think next time maybe I'll try to actually go over the bridge and ride to Hatogaya station just so I can say I did. I'm not really sure what else is out there to ride to, not late at night at least.

Comments

[tadzilla.livejournal.com]

I heard that in Kyoto, the streets are named. Source: Matsuda-sensei.

But I agree that in Tokyo, finding anything is hard as hell. It felt like a real-life RPG to me.

[oren.livejournal.com]

I believe that all streets are named. I've just never been able to find indicators of a street's name by the street anywhere in Japan unless it was a major road.

An attempt to explain it

[the2belo.livejournal.com]

It's a matter of locations (not only in Japan but also in many other Asian countries) being referred to by the block, not the street. In Japan the streets are not officially named, but the blocks are either named or numbered in order from the widest to the most specific; thus, addresses are something-ku (ward), something-cho (district), x-chome (block), xyz (building number). If you're ever lost, just look at the nearest telephone pole or bridge overpass: The current location is usually printed on metal signs, often even with English subtitles. Intersections also have specific names that you can use when giving directions ("turn right at Marunouchi").

Streets were given names during the postwar US occupation to bring Japan more in line with Western standards, but the practice never officially stuck. Some major thoroughfares have what can be called "nicknames" (something-dori, etc) but are never used in mailing addresses.

Re: An attempt to explain it

[oren.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I do remember living at ロ32-1 in Kanazawa　and thinking that was a pretty boring way to naming stuff.

Then again, Seattle isn't much better. Everything is just numbered streets then add north, south, east, and west to it.

[dr4b]

Yeah, I don't think I know of the names of any streets near me except for Sun Road and Sangyo Doro. If I need to give directions to my place, it's something like "go down Sun Road to Tsurukame Land, and..."

So I mean, I think the road I got to eventually had a name, because it was wide and had many stores on it, BUT the easiest way to describe it is just to say what was on the corner and what area it was in, I think.