Friday 5 March 2010

My neighborhood, Kuzuha

This time I will take a closer look into my neighborhood. I currently live in a single and rather small T1 apartment in what I would call a cluster of tall buildings in Kuzuha city. It is a somewhat new area since fifty years ago no one lived here, at least not to this degree. It is then not surprising to see tall and impressive buildings such as fine city kuzuha; kuzuha mall; and Osaka Dental University (depicted in the picture bellow left; middle in the back; and right respectively) or golf fields across the railway.

In particular, the group of buildings I live in are made out of six numbered 15 store tall buildings. As depicted in the image below in the middle of the buildings there is a small park with a playground for children and behind it a hospital (seen between buildings). Due to the large amount of people there are several services at the resident disposal. For example, a day care service for old people or a bus to pick up children for school. The buildings were also built to have rooms at ground floor that are used for small shops and clubs. There are several types of clubs: dance, exercise, cram school, calligraphy, etc but they share the same rooms though not concurrently. It is interesting to see different age here attend different clubs. For example, the dance clubs is attended by kids, the exercise by adult women and the calligraphy by the elderly.
Next to my cluster of buildings is yet another set of buildings divided in two groups of six buildings. One belongs to NTT (brown building in the picture bellow) employees while the other to public officials (white buildings in the picture bellow). The separation between each group is done by a small wall and trees and each has their own playgrounds which made me wonder if the separation is more than just physical affecting also the relationship between families in different group of buildings. Unfortunately my Japanese skills as they are now were not enough to delve deeper in the matter.

In the end my knowledge of people behaviors in my neighborhood is ultimately limited to the small amount of time I have lived here. I can only describe what I see. Therefore I am looking forward to seeing what surprises my neighborhood has stored for me.

3 comments:

  1. What is a T1 apartment?

    You describe well what is in the area. But I would like to know more about the people there and their interactions. How is living in an apartment complex different from living in a more tradional neighborhood with houses?

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  2. Hmm, since there is no actual meaning of T1 I thought it was a convention. T1 stands for one bedroom.

    Knowing the people takes time and since this is a rather large community most interactions are through the clubs I described and when the kids are playing in the playgrounds. Nonetheless I agree that I could have explored more the topic. Regarding the difference between houses and the apartment complex I believe it would be more interesting to see the differences in community interactions. Still it would take a long time to do a proper questionnaire to have a base for comparison therefore the idea was discarded from the start.

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  3. wow. I used to work in Kuzuha before those apts were made. It is amazing seeing them now.

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