It quickly became apparent, even from that first walk as Heidi and I marched out on our initial reconnaissance mission together, that Shimonoseki was in love with the blowfish. My first encounter with the Shimonosekian blowfish in the wild was upon a manhole cover; a cartoony likeness of the chubby vertebrate was engraved into the metal. Though I didn’t realize it at the time, manhole cover art is ubiquitous in Japan, with most cities having one or more distinctive designs, sometimes quite elaborate or even beautiful. The manhole blowfish, furthermore, was only the beginning of the marine mascot encounters; over the course of my stay I would find the fish’s likeness in numerous statue forms, sometimes singular and sometimes in metal-hued schools of puffed fish, as well as blowfish designs adorning phone booths, escalators, bus seats, and even encompassing an entire tunnel so that it appears that drivers are cruising straight into a Godzilla-sized blowfish’s gullet. The Shimonoseki residents even have a special name for the fish; normally blowfish in Japanese language is rendered as fugu, but some Shimonosekians call the fish fuku because that word can also mean luck. To Shimonoseki, blowfish indeed are a source of luck—or at least money.
But I wouldn’t learn all that for a long time yet. On that first walk, I was barely able to register my surroundings. The world seemed surreal to me, as if I was somehow separate from it, a wall of unreality between me and the familiar and unfamiliar sights and sounds that meshed and mixed around me. I felt as if I had stepped into one of those Japanese movies, because the world with its abundant concrete and miniature green mountains and boxy, minuscule vehicles was straight out of those films; the only thing that would make it complete would be if a gargantuan, freakish monster clawed its way over one of the mountains and screamed its bestial rage to the skies. The streets dipped and twisted up and down steep inclines, carved out of hills, with cement walls shaped like bizarre enormous waffles holding up the dirt. My legs, accustomed to the flatter, wider areas of small town Iowa, quickly took up a slight protest even on the first incline leading away from the apartment. Meanwhile, Heidi gave me a rundown of facts and information I would need to know about life in Japan, most of which probably sailed through my ears completely unhindered.
I marveled at my surroundings. There was a lot I knew about Japan, a lot I had noticed from the movies, and a lot of knowledge I had internalized from reading books. But that didn’t prepare me for living there, and the brief informational tomes I had consumed before coming could not cover much of the smaller incidentals of everyday life. What struck me most on that first trek were the sidewalks. As we left the apartments, the blacktop road running up the hill nearby had no sidewalk at all; instead, there was merely a white line separating where pedestrians were supposed to tread from the vehicular fast lane—stay within the line, I was told, and any car that ran me over would be liable and have to pay for any damages, or death, incurred. Not so if I walked outside the line, in which case apparently any injury and maiming would be faulted on my own head. Those warnings kept me “in line” for a while, until I realized that most people, including the Japanese, don’t pay much attention to the safety lines.
Further on, when we did reach an actual sidewalk, it still didn’t match my American walkway expectations. Though the cement was formed into square blocks like in America, they were further segmented into those that were firmly grounded and the smaller blocks parallel that covered a drainage ditch. The ditch ran up alongside a concrete wall that had been put there after the road had been carved out of the hill; all along the concrete wall were PVC pipes poking out where water could drain away during heavy rains, then run down the drainage ditch underneath the smaller, shifting sidewalk squares. Because the walkway wasn’t on a city block as we understand them in the USA, there wasn’t a curb so to speak; instead little concrete guard protrusions, perfect for balancing upon, had been erected at intervals to separate the sidewalk from the street.
Then, as we approached the shopping district, the sidewalks changed again. Suddenly in the middle of the walk was a row of yellow tiles that had uncomfortable protuberances running across them. The tiles usually ran in a single-file line, but would spread out at intersections. If I walked on them, they hurt my feet after a while. At the crosswalk, the crossing lights chirped at us as if mechanical birds were hiding in the metal poles, squeaking with perfectly uniform pauses. Heidi informed me that these features were all installed for the benefit of the blind, who could follow the yellow tiles by feel, and know when it was okay to walk across the street by listening for the high-pitched chirps. Later, I would learn that some crosswalks, instead of chirping, would play musical snippets instead, especially in bigger cities. I wasn’t quite sure how all this would help blind people. The sounds seemed confusing to me, especially because at most crosswalks there are two roads to cross, so I wondered how blind people would know which street was safe according to which chirp emitted, and how useful the tiles actually were for navigation purposes. Nevertheless, I was utterly fascinated, and couldn’t stop tromping on the tiles, despite the discomfort in my soles.
Nihon Kibou--Hope for Japan 