King Friday, in Japan

This is the very first photo I took of my neighborhood in Neyagawa-shi, Osaka, on the very first morning I set out to walk to the station myself. Despite the route being simple, I quickly lost my way in what deceptively figured itself as a suburban labyrinth. In fact, aside from the name plates and sign posts marking street numbers, the houses are all distinguishable by other particular features that I've come to recognize. For example, should I return home in the evening, the house to the left in the photograph above will surely be emitting classical music from an upstairs window. On certain days in the afternoon, should I return from classes at the right hour, I can recognize the first house on my own street by the two boys who sit on its doorstep, engrossed either in their GameBoys or the Pokémon cards they've spread carefully on the step. 
Some of my neighbors are fond of gardening, and as I turn out from this pocket of homes and onto a more busy street in my walk towards the station every morning, I often meet an older man or woman meticulously tending several pots of roses and other flowers.

When I say "meet," I must admit, unfortunately, that it is a meeting of little more than our eyes. Venturing further out from the community of homes in which I myself am living, and onto more major streets people appear to become slowly more guarded in their daily business and composure. A block from my own house, I exchange a smile, a nod, and a, "Good morning," with neighbors. Away from the housing area, past the traffic and Seven Eleven, the mothers with their cap-wearing preschoolers bicycling busily down the street, and everyone appears to be rather guarded and business-like. (The old man I joined other commuters in determinedly ignoring as he relieved himself into a drainage ditch by the side of the road--on several occasions now--appears to be somewhat of an exception to this observation...)
Literally speaking, this seemed to make sense, as the people I see on the street(s) everyday have left the private sphere of 家 (uchi = home/house/indoors) to 外 (soto = outside), one of ostensibly greater discretion. So it may appear anyway, and to an extent certainly be true. When I leave home in the mornings, I call out, 「いってきます！」(Ittekimasu = set expression; "I'm leaving/heading out"), and when I return home in the afternoon or evening I once again exchange greetings with my host mother or father: a 「ただいま」(Tadaima = set expression, roughly; "I'm home") for an 「おかえり」(Okaeri = set expression, roughly; "Welcome home"). At home, I exchange outdoor shoes for inside slippers, and drop the more troublesome articles, physical or otherwise, I've been carrying throughout the day, as I've been shown by example by my host family. (My host father, for example, often goes shirtless on hot days when I'm not around. My older host sister similarly foregoes the trouble of pants on occasion, and falls asleep in this state of semi-undress on the couch, her stylish and smart heeled shoes toppled haphazardly around the entryway.) The home, or 家, is a place to relax and lay down one's guard or worries. It is, after all, a home. 
Recently, I've begun to wonder, however, to what extent this is not also "home," or 家:

It is only the road just outside the station, but it is also my station. To use one comparison, it is another eggshell of many wrapped around one another. This "layer," or "eggshell," if you will, is another step closer to home. It is not just a feeling of "almost there," as one exits the station ticket gate, either: it is the familiarity of seeing the same high school and middle school students that I passed that morning as we traveled to our respective schools, the same shops and landmarks one passes everyday and has come to associate with being just a little bit closer--if only a little--to the relaxation of home.

This idea struck me most intensely and concretely when not just my host parents, upon my entering the house, but The Takoyaki Vendor or The Man Who Owns the Fruit Shop By the Station began greeting my return to the neighborhood with a familiar, 「おかえり」. At first, I found this somewhat jarring and was unsure of the proper way to reply. Would it be right to nod and say accordingly, 「ただいま！」?  My host parents seemed to think so, when asked them about it. Thus far, my doing so hasn't resulted in any looks of particular confusion or chastisement. 
Though this house that I am living in, at least while I am in Japan, is "home," my literal 家、the neighborhood, as it becomes familiar, may just become a little less 外, a little more 家.

最初に、A Paltry Few Notes on Being in Japan

For this first post, I've been instructed to write about my "early impressions of Japan." Since this is my third trip to the country date (albeit the longest), I feel it's a tad difficult to live up to that request properly. Still, by using very first experience in Japan last summer (2010) as a sounding board for my current experiences in the Kansai region, I think I can make a few points.
My first trip to Japan was a three-week vacation for the purposes of sightseeing and visiting my friends, all of whom live in or around Tokyo. Because of this, my first glimpse of "actual Japan"--that is, after the train ride out from Narita Airport--was Shinjuku Station, the world record holder for the busiest station in terms of passengers. Indeed, if anything can be said of Japan at a glance, even towards statistics, it is that for a relatively small island country, Japan has a very high population density.

お正月/New Years  2010-2011; People waiting in line to pray at a temple in Kawagoe, Saitama Prefecture.

Never has the word 「人川」(hitogawa; lit. "human river") been so applicable.
One would expect the shock of such an impressive human torrent to be abhorrent, especially to a foreigner, and even more so to one such as myself: I hail from a small seaside town in California where public transportation is limited at best. Where I come from, there are wide roads, open swaths of solitude, and if one does need to travel anywhere, one takes a car. Nonetheless, in my visits to Japan, it has not been my impression that the crowds were overwhelming. Or, perhaps better stated, in Japan, I have never once felt the the need to label such masses of people as--what should perhaps rightly be--chaos.
One could perhaps call it "order," or 「秩序」(chitsujo), as did my Kansai-born Japanese teachers of this past summer. To be sure, order is important in Japan.

September 16, 2011; Apartment building in Hirakata-shi, Osaka.

Perhaps ironically, though, I feel that sums it all up a little too neatly, and too simply. Rather, I would say that order exists in these basic visible patterns in Japan (i.e. though people may cross the street or pass each other in great numbers and in what appears to be a great jumble of bodies, it is rare for anyone to collide, even to stop-start as many of us do when by chance we meet a stranger who seems bent on passing us on the same side by which we mean to pass him) because of a mutual understanding.
Japanese verbal communication is somewhat infamous for this quality: in a good deal of Japan's common discourse, much of what is said is not actually said aloud, or if it is, the true or implied meaning is understood by both parties. An American friend of mine discovered this the hard way after studying abroad. He returned to Japan the following year to visit, and stayed with his previous host family for a time. When he was about to leave their home, they objected, and told him he should stay longer. Though I know not how many times he may have been asked and refused (as in the so-called '3 Times Rule': refuse an offer three times before it can be assumed to be sincere), this friend eventually accepted the family's offer and stayed on. As his host parents became increasingly disgruntled, he soon realized that they had only invited him to stay longer out of something like common courtesy. In fact, their offer was not sincere.
Unlike my unfortunate friend, most Japanese people are well aware of such word play. It is a delicate business to tune in to one's partner's thoughts through the minutest visual cues, tone of voice, timing, and so on, but it has been my experience, as opposed to my own American culture, that the Japanese are generally speaking much more in tune with one another to this effect. With this kind of mutual understanding of one's own space, that of others, and others' body language and so forth, crowd navigation, too, becomes easier. Certainly, however, this can only be said to be my hypothesis, based on my own experiences (and one that definitely can't be explained with the attention it deserves in a short blog post).
How well I'll navigate them from here on remains to be seen!

September 15, 2011; Keihan Rail Line.