I've been toying with the idea of blogging about our city, especially using photos. There's so much I don't know about where we live, but let's see if together we can learn a bit more.
When we're talking to people who haven't been to Tokyo or Japan we often find a lot of misconceptions about what this actually looks like. It's not a place I ever aspired to live in and if you'd told me back in my early 20s that I'd end up living more than a decade here, I wouldn't have believed you.
We live in Tokyo, but Tokyo is technically a prefecture/state made up of cities, even though it is routinely referred to as a city. Strange, isn't it? The capital of a country being a prefecture not a city! A great current example of this is the 2020 Olympics which will be held where? Tokyo. Olympics are hosted by cities not prefectures/states!
When we're talking to people who haven't been to Tokyo or Japan we often find a lot of misconceptions about what this actually looks like. It's not a place I ever aspired to live in and if you'd told me back in my early 20s that I'd end up living more than a decade here, I wouldn't have believed you.
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| Everything in this except for the green is a part of Tokyo prefecture. The purple section is a special part called the 23 wards of Tokyo and is probably what most people think of when they think of Tokyo. They are the central core and have the highest population density. Two island chains are also lumped into the prefecture. It's our hope to visit some of these, maybe as campers at some distant time when the boys are no longer living with us. |
We live in Tokyo, but Tokyo is technically a prefecture/state made up of cities, even though it is routinely referred to as a city. Strange, isn't it? The capital of a country being a prefecture not a city! A great current example of this is the 2020 Olympics which will be held where? Tokyo. Olympics are hosted by cities not prefectures/states!
Wikipedia says: "Tokyo is often referred to as a city, but is officially known and governed as a "metropolitan prefecture", which differs from and combines elements of a city and a prefecture, a characteristic unique to Tokyo."
Our address is in the city of Higashi Kurume.
Wikipedia says: "Higashikurume is a city located in the western portion of Tokyo Metropolis, in the central Kantō region of Japan. As of 1 February 2016, the city had an estimated population of 116,896 and a population density of 9,070 persons per km." You can see it above in red/dark pink.
So here's my first photo. This is the front of the Christian Academy in Japan. You can immediately see that it doesn't fit the "inner city" model that you might think. That's true for the whole of the city, urban residential and agriculture are intertwined in a way that I've never seen in Australia.
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