Moon Island & Clear Sea

The name of a novel I'm writing? No - the names of the districts Satoko and I now shop and live in respectively: Tsukishima (Moon island) and Harumi (Clear Sea). Take those translations with a few grains of salt, ok?

No pics of the new apartment yet, but it's just to the left behind the bright lights in the center of the photo here. If you look on a map (and zoom out) you'll see that we're on an island whose periphery is suspiciously Euclidean, surrounded by other islands whose peripheries are ... suspiciously Euclidean!

Yes, they're all reclaimed land, some started as far back as 1650. Actually the northern end of Tsukishima is built on top of a real island which used to support a small village, and now sports a towering housing complex. There's a gym there that we joined lickety-split.

Our "manshon" (=mansion =apartment/apartment building) is part of a self-contained village city called Triton (pronounced to-ri-ton) that predates the much more up-market and scaled-up Roppongi Hills development. Which I'm happy about, because as a Japanese friend remarked: "it doesn't feel like Tokyo". Plenty of shops but no crowds. Plenty of space, but close to the city centre. There's lots to like, if you feel safe ...

What is reclaimed land? There are many answers, but they're hard to find. Some of the locations around Tokyo Bay were filled with, uh, landfill (a tautology?) which basically means rubbish. Others were filled by simply bulldozing the ruins of bombed-out post WWII Tokyo into the bay. So unlike the wise man, I'm not sure what my house is built on. But I'm pretty sure what happens when the next big quake comes.

Here's a very informative and scary article about what happened during and after the Great Hanshin Earthquake that destroyed Kobe. More importantly, it talks about why. Anyway, there's something like a 30% chance of the big one hitting Tokyo in the next 10 years. 90% in the next 50 years. The land under Harumi will liquefy and dozens of very tall buildings will form the next round of landfill.

I don't intend to be here at that time. Until then, it's a relatively pleasant place to leave my hat.

The Stairs

Finally it's goodbye to my home of the last year and a half, and in some ways good riddance, though I will miss some of the conveniences of the quiet surrounding neighbourhood. The apartment was too small, too old, and a little bit dangerous. "Dangerous?" I hear you ask. Well, just look at The Stairs to the front door!

They descend directly onto the road, and the road is without pavements; a one-way, one-lane, one car-width shortcut across a train line and between two large arterial roads. That means fast cars and scant pedestrian refuge. Many a rainy night I trod The Stairs with life-or-death focus on the task at hand.

How I marvelled some time ago, when two delivery guys manhandled an inherited fridge (thanks Nick!) up The Stairs, through the front door - only marginally larger than The Fridge itself - and into the kitchen, whilst miraculously removing their shoes in the process!

Moving The Fridge out last week was similarly miraculous, but in a significantly more alarming vein. This time one of the moving guys lost it on The Stairs, and nearly paid for it with his life. The Fridge is big, and one man alone cannot stop it (save Damian perhaps), so down The Stairs went The Fridge taking with it the hapless moving guy. Along came a car on its high-speed shortcut, and ...

Somehow he survived with only a bruised leg and badly scraped arm. The Fridge suffered a slightly crumpled underside and dented backpiece but luckily still works. The concrete paving at the bottom of the stairs had several chunks smashed off by The Fridge. But The Stairs ...

The Stairs remain. Undamaged. Securely in place. And in my mind.