Keihan Chronicle

I live in Hirakata, the same town that holds the Kansai Gaidai University. If we look to the facts, Hirakata is a city with more than 400,000 inhabitants, and it's not an inconsiderable cipher at all, especially when compared with my hometown, with almost the half of population. However, when I talk about Hirakata with some Japanese friends from the university I usually hear expressions like "Hirakata is a countryside town".

At first this is kind of shocking, but when you take a walk around you understand what they mean. No matter how big is it, you can get a similar feeling to the one you get when walking across a small town. Silent alleys, paddy fields in the most unexpected places, almost no people on the streets... Where are these almost half million people hiding? Even when in the center, around Hirakata Station, big crowds of people are rarely seen. In short, as for what I've been able to see in the month I've lived in Hirakata, it is a city with almost no urban feeling.

Is Japan different?

This question could get very different answers depending on who you are asking to. As for someone who came from a distance of more of ten thousand kilometers in the west, the most expected reaction when landing would probably be one of surprise and excitement for getting into a new culture. Books, history and the peoples themselves have always divided the world into East and West as the opposite, and most people on both sides do believe in this distinction, picturing the other side as something exotic or even bizarre. Is this distinction real or not? Who knows, again it depends on the point of view.

Somehow I believed in this difference, and I expected to be shocked by it in some way, but my very first impression of Japan was that I was not as impressed as I thought I would be. Is true that the differences between Japan and my country are evident: signals written in kanji, futon instead of bed, chopsticks instead of forks, bikes everywhere… But I realized that people do the same things everywhere, in a different way, but the same things after all.

Maybe that’s because I’ve read and watched a lot of material about Japan in the last years, and things here are already somehow familiar to me, or maybe is because in this two weeks in Hirakata I’ve not been able to see Japan in its whole glory, but again, I’ve not been at all as shocked as I expected I would be. This is only a first impression, and there’s still a long way to go in my Japan experience, so this could just be a snap reaction of the first moment and fade away as I discover new things. Time will tell.