Won't Miss #7 - urban ugliness (reflection)

When I originally posted about how ugly Tokyo generally is, someone asked where I took the picture used in that original post. They could not believe that was a typical part of the city and thought that neighborhood had to reflect some sort of older, more impoverished time period in Tokyo's history. The truth is that much of the city areas are not pretty. My picture was not a misrepresentation. All of the lovely ones showing the best parts only were the skewed view. It's as if someone made a huge bunch of cookies, decorated them all badly but one and took a picture only of the one that looked good. Sure, there are gorgeous parts of Japan, but they are eclipsed in number by the range of ugly to blah areas if you are looking at the frequency.

That being said, now that I'm back home, I'm mainly struck by the suburban and rural ugliness of where I am/have been. Things look and feel very bland to me, even when they are relatively "nice" objectively speaking. Driving along in a car, it tends to just feel like things are tedious or rundown. Even when it was ugly in Tokyo, it wasn't boring. 

It turns out that the ugliness, which was very real, is something I could forgive in exchange for the fact that there was so much of interest contained behind those grey, boxy facades. The surface now seems far less important than the substance beneath it. 

Won't Miss #194 - lack of grass

Some of the things I write about in this blog may be similar all over Japan, and some are highly localized. This one is definitely related to not only living in Tokyo, but my particular area. I live in a residential area, but it's almost all concrete. My guess is this is because it's so close to Shinjuku, a major business, government, and shopping center. Our location is great because it makes commuting easier and it's not far from a major transportation hub. However, all of the land in the areas not too far from Tokyo is pretty valuable, and people aren't going to waste it with plots of grass. My exposure to grass is so limited that I was walking to a store about a year ago and smelled something which was vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place it at first. I realized that it was fresh-cut grass, and I hadn't smelled it for years.

I grew up in a place that was surrounded by grass and trees, and I miss this close regular contact with nature, so I won't miss the absence of grass around me.