Wednesday, 9th September: A Walk Round Chikusa

Summer was mercifully short this year, and I've been taking the opportunity to go for walks. The Nagoya International Centre offers walking guides for those who want to wander around our pleasant but slightly mousy city. Even though Nagoya is one of the biggest cities in Japan, we can't really compete with Tokyo's edge, Kyoto's history, Osaka's gregarious people or Sapporo's novelty bear magnets. We're mainly a city of business and industry (and chicken restaurants, lots of famous chicken restaurants). When I ask my students to name some famous places or recommended things to do, I usually get the sound of sucked-in-teeth and prevarication in response. Nagoya Castle, a couple of shrines and the aquarium are the main responses I get, not a lot else. Still, the International Centre does its best to offer a few routes you could take around the city to check out some history and walk off all that chicken you ate. And even if it's not the most jaw-dropping city in the world, I've come to think of it as my home and I have a great deal of affection for Nagoya.

Most recently, I took the International Centre's recommended route around Chikusa ward, a reasonably central area near my house containing a couple of universities, the baseball stadium and the pachinko district. However the route shied away from these more showy elements and instead took me mostly down leafy residential roads. I actually saw very little of the attractions I was supposed to be paying attention to - one of the shrines was down some weird side-road I couldn't find and some of the others I just somehow missed completely. The maps aren't very detailed and Japanese roads can be very hard to navigate due to most of them not having any names. I was also relying on my phone, but constant switching between the International Centre's map and Google Maps to cross-reference my location drained my battery pretty quickly and I basically made up the second half of the route myself, sneaking through a university campus (partly out of nosiness) and finding my way back to the station. All in all it took about two hours and I covered about half the district. As I said, I didn't actually see much in the way of major sites, but I actually sort of prefer it that way. It's nice to just explore a region of my city that I have no real reason to be in, and pass through ordinary streets looking at mildly interesting things like these:

I'd especially like to draw your attention to "Snafkins Music Academy".