片鉾東町

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us."

Online Variorum of Darwin's Origin of Species: second British edition (1860), page 490

I live in a residential area, in a place called “East halberd pieces”.

There used to be nothing really special about this area, a quiet place with some upper middle-class homes,

Some middle middle-class homes,

And some lower middle-class homes, everything within a minute walking.

In other words, a place like you can find pretty much everywhere in the developed world, a micro environment with its own harmony, its own local way of working except that the scene takes place in Japan and clean lawns are sometimes replaced by rice fields.　

Yeah, there would not be a lot to say of this area some alien had not set up. 4 buildings full of foreigners from all over the world are constantly leading their own way of living in this quiet area.

One has to know that “As of the end of 2004, 1.97 million foreign nationals were registered in Japan, accounting for about 1.6 percent of the total population (127.69 million)” http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?ID=487

But I am pretty sure that if you compare the ratio of Japanese nationals to foreigners within Katahoko Higashi, the percentage will be much higher.

You can see them every day walking around, doing shopping, adapting fast to the new neighborhood and acting as if they had always been living here.

They do not act as tourists, nor do they really try to integrate the local society. They are temporary residents.

I have not been living here long enough to acknowledge the actual changes and polemics this bunch of foreigners brought here. But what I notice as of today, local people do not even pay attention to temporary residents. They have integrated our presence as a fact, something unavoidable in the absence of being benefic. But I do believe that our presence, how annoying and disturbing, bring those local people an opening on the external world some of them would never get.

1st or 3rd impressions ?

I am in Japan. I am actually back in Japan.

The first time I stepped on the Japanese land, I was barely 19, had 3 Japanese friends living in the Kansai Area, could barely speak Japanese.

I looked like that:

Tired, happy, amazed, lost, excited...

And Japan looked like that:

crowded, colorful, noisy, busy...

...yummy...

...technologically advanced...

...respectful towards the so many rules and law...

...traditionally beautiful...

My perception of Japan was pretty much like that:

I would not wear the same colors people did, I had come from my picture whose blue, white and red colors contrasted the Japanese ones. They were watercolor and I, gouache. I then could not act nor participate to the whole picture; an evasive mix of beautiful sceneries with blurred colors. A grey side of things hiden below a good dash of prettyness. Still an amazing country in which I did not have any bearings, I was only a temporary visitor.

The third time I stepped on the Japanese land, I was almost 21, had a 50 more Japanese and other friends living in the Kansai Area and spoke Japanese fluently in everyday life.

I actually look like that:

Tired, happy, amazed, acquainted with the environment, excited...

And Japan looks like that:

...peaceful, colorful, quiet, routine...

...delicious...

...traditionally beautiful...

... technology late and lack of obedience in some areas...

It took me no more than a week to feel like kind of home, a week to forget the cultural fronteers between Japanese and westerners. I can feel and touch some aspects of the Japanese culture, participate and be a temporary resident.

Kansai Gaidai and its international community helps probably a lot, but even though I am still not, and will not be, fully watercolor, I am something in between, some international color that goes either with Japan as well as it goes with Brazil or Kenya without damaging the host picture nor erasing mine.