Alex Quinn's Japan Journal

Town

I live in Aioi city (pop ≈33,000, 90.43 km², 34.91 mi²).  Aioi is about the same size as Port Townsend, Washington.  Aioi features a port, two grocery stores, a few convenience stores, a main shopping strip, a museum, a library, a high school (not mine), a few parks, and several Japanese restaurants.  The bullet trains ("shinkansen") stop in Aioi, which is very unusual for a town of this size.  It has to do with a quirk in the layout of the train system and the local geography.  For Aioi residents, it's great because you can catch a super-fast train from Aioi to Tokyo or just about anywhere else in Japan.

Aioi Station

A map of Aioi posted on a sign in front of the station.  It's not very legible, even if you can read Japanese, but it gives you an idea of the shape of the place and the harbor that cuts into the middle of the city.

There's a highway down the middle of Aioi.  It's not too disruptive, though.

In fact, it's kinda pretty at night.  Thanks David for the awesome photograph.

Behind my apartment, there is a bamboo forest.  I haven't been in it, but my buddy David climbed around in it during a recent visit and found interesting critters including wild boar and a spider with a big fuzzy tail.

My buddy David took this from the bamboo forest behind my apartment.  From this view, you can see all of Aioi.  You get a pretty good idea of how big this place is.  Not exactly the sticks, but I wouldn't call it a city, either.  It's somewhere in between.

And here's David himself in the forest.  He used a timer to take this.

He found this cool spider while he was there.  Notice the tail.  Weird, huh?

Here's a model of the kind of boar David saw in the woods.  We found this model in a nearby mall outside a drug store.  I'm not sure where the connection with drugs comes in, but whatever.