My Tiny Apartment

Having no Japanese language skills, I was happy to let my employer, Nova, arrange my accommodations. They found an apartment for me in Kakogawa, a nice mid-sized town about an hour west of Osaka. Kakogawa is basically a suburb, except for some steel factories...



...and a seaport...



...but mostly, Kakogawa looks like this:



Like so many communities in Japan, it's yet another sprawling, sleepy town. It has well-groomed baseball parks...



...American-style malls...



...thousands and thousands of bicycles...



...and almost as many vending machines.



There are ugly, monolithic apartment blocks housing thousands of people...



...right across the street from wonderfully traditional one-family homes.



Of course, Kakogawa has its fair share of typical Japanese accoutrements such as cherry blossoms...



...Shinto shrines...



...and cemeteries with offerings of soft drinks and other vittles for the ancestors.



And then there's my tiny little apartment, just a ten-minute walk from Kakogawa's train station. That's it up there on the second floor.



Though it may be small, it has a cozy common area...



...and a kitchen just barely big enough for cooking.



At night, I slept on a Japanese-style futon...



...and in the morning, I would wake to the sound of trains passing just outside my balcony.



But I didn't mind too much. Waking up early just meant extra time to explore Kakogawa on my bike, an opportunity I took almost every weekend.