We went to check out a station between our two favorite neighborhoods in Tokyo. We were pretty excited about the idea of living close to both of them, as expressed in a recent post,To move or not to move - Finding the best of Tokyo. Before checking out the landlords place, I decided to walk there. It took about 35 minutes.
As I walked through the park, I realized it wasn’t all that full of greenery, more of a bunch of sports fields and playgrounds on the edge of a tiny stream with a few trees around it. “Well, whatever, a few trees are better than none” I thought.
As I got closer to the station, I started to think “this sure looks like the boonies, it must be a minor station, that’s ok, maybe more local.”
I got closer...
“Pretty hard to imagine that this is just a 30 minute walk from my neighborhood...”
It looked just like the deep suburbs, the places Tokyoites call “countryside”. (Everything looks like countryside to those who grew up thinking of Tokyo as “the city”. But this was Tokyo!
Eesh!
When I got to the station, I went across the tracks to see is the other side was more interesting, but it was less interesting.
To be fair, even a boring station in Japan would be fun as hell to a newcomer to Tokyo, and is beyond convenient. Everything you need is anywhere to be found and there are even a nice variety of restaurants. My standards are incredibly high, some might say. But actually I only require one thing, a sense of community and somewhere to connect with it.
I got the sense that if there was a sense of community in the neighborhood, and there probably was, it was hard to connect with and probably not nearly as open-minded as the stationed that lined the tracks to the north or south.
This here was a commuter pocket conveniently located near the center of the city. To start a business here with the sufficient resources and connections and support....may make some sense...maybe I could help draw some of the awesomeness of the nearby areas.
...but to live here....it would be a major downgrade from where I live right now. The most important thing to me is a feeling of friendliness among neighbors. It’s hard enough to find in Tokyo, but I have it. It won’t be worth the crappy park nearby or a sightless bigger room.
When I got back to my station, I immediately ran into two friends and we made plans to meet for lunch this week. Just feeling the warmth for them made me regret wanting to leave this neighborhood. Perhaps if we moved to my old neighborhood which also has many friends, but otherwise, I don’t want to give this up for something worse.
So we decided to give up on moving for the time being and deal with our tiny tiny apartment until late summer or early autumn when we will reasses.
Before we move we want to improve our work situation, get to know our roommates better, get to know our neighborhood more, and also connect with my old neighborhood to explore the possibility of opening our small business there in the future. Living in one of the coolest neighborhoods and working in the other sounds pretty good 😃. We may move to that neighborhood after all, but not under such desperate conditions where we’d have to forfeit all our fiat savings and even risk digging into crypto.
I think there is plenty were can do here, and spring is just around the corner. It’s going to be a different town and I think we will have a great few months even if we stay where we are.
I’m working on the release of my novel, more vlogging off Hive (to bring more people to my work, to 3speak and to Natural Medicine) and may even get back to my music soon.
Life is good, even in a tiny box 😂
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