After Jeremy Hedley’s recent posts (start at September 3rd and scroll up) about Japanese neighborhood architecture and the moribund state of Japanese aesthetics, which were occassioned by the pending razing of an old house in his Setagaya (Tokyo) neighborhood, I began to pay more attention to my immediate surroundings here in Warabi (Saitama prefecture, immediately to the north of Tokyo), and started to take better note of the mish-mash of sublime and hideous, old and new, built-with-care and pre-fab, that characterizes much of the urban and suburban Japanese landscape.
I’m not exactly sure why, but up till now, some 6 months after arriving in Japan, I haven’t been very interested in or inspired to document the place I will be calling home for the forseeable future. I think part of this resistance is derived from feeling self-concious about being a foreigner in a 98% Japanese city, and not wanting to elicit more attention (or suspicion, for that matter) than I already get by walking around with my camera snapping pictures. But a bigger factor might be that up until now, I’ve viewed my neighborhood for the most part as unremmittingly boring and uninteresting. This is somewhat of an embarrassing admission to make, being as I pride myself on the challenge of finding or discovering the visually interesting out of the mundane, the boring, the ordinary, and the ugly.
But I’m now seeing that my reluctance to Look In My own Back Yard — or LIMBY for short — has been at the expense of depriving those who’ve come to enjoy my Japan photo diary a view into what is an integral part of my existence, the neighborhood in which I live.
Jeremy has been planning on making this week “House Week” at his site, Antipixel, posting pictures of houses in his neighborhood, or “the good, the bad, and the butt-ugly” as he puts it. (He’s had some camera problems but hopefully he’ll be posting images soon). In a sort of virtual “tagging along,” I thought I would attempt to do the same, and force myself to re-assess the visual value of my suburban surroundings in the process. Hopefully I’ll also come to feel more at home in my new neighborhood as a result.
So consider the images in the previous post as an introduction to the neighborhood, with the expectation that we’ll amble a bit more slowly and peek a little closer in subsequent postings.
