Day 11: part 1 - Saturday morning

It seems that I have been quite tired the last couple of days. I don't know why this might be. Maybe it is because I have finally succumbed to jet lag. That would mean that for the first several days, I was riding some sort of high based on the novelty and excitement of being in Japan. It might also be that I have been pushing myself too much lately, with running from one place to another in order to feel like I am getting the most out of my trip. Maybe I wasn't getting as much sleep as I should have. Or it might be the heat and humidity of this place in this time of year. Maybe it's a combination of those things, or more, or something else entirely. I am disappointed because I feel that my research and writing at this point in the trip are beginning to suffer. I can't quite think of the right words to write, or reasonable thoughts to think.

It surprised me that I slept so much yesterday, and yet today I woke up tired. In fact, yesterday I slept until the afternoon, then went to see Dreamgirls, then came back to my hotel and slept until the next morning. I knew that I would have to travel today, and that there wasn't much that I could do before going to the train station to catch the train to Shizuoka, but still I felt like something was wrong, or not right, or I don't know what. Like I said, maybe I was just tired; I often feel like this when I am tired. In any case, after taking a shower and doing my laundry, I forced myself to take a walk around the neighborhood, and see what Shin-Imamiya was like.

Being in this new place for the first time on Wednesday, I thought it was great, and I noticed how many inexpensive hotels seemed to be in the area, and how well it seemed to cater to the hostel-traveller community. One reason this excited me was because even if I stayed in this hotel for a month's time, I would still pay less for the room than I currently pay for my apartment in New York City. It seemed like Japan and Osaka could be quite affordable!

But walking around this morning, I seemed to pay attention a bit closer to what I had only noticed out of the corner of my eye for the past few days. It seemed as though this neighborhood was devoid of women. Every now and again, I would see a woman riding her bike down through the street, but it seemed that it was about ninety percent men around here (not counting the western faces I saw and assumed to be tourists). And it wasn't just men from across the board who populated this area, but a very specific type of man, it seemed. They were mostly middle-aged, and very thin, and frail and tired looking with faces that the sun had made rough and leathered. When they walked, they were slow in their pace, and moved as though they had just finished a marathon. Maybe these men were coming home from work after laboring all night? If they weren't moving, then they were squatting on the sidewalk, reading the paper, or talking to a friend. Some were sleeping on the sidewalk, and more than a few were in wheel chairs, being pushed by another man. The thought occurred to me that, just as I had supposed the cheap rates at these hotels would make low monthly rentals for living, several of these men might have come to the same conclusion, and were living in the same hotels I was staying at. Indeed, I would often run into middle-aged, leathery faced Japanese men in the elevator of the hotel, making his way to the shower. Perhaps in between the Pachinko parlours I would see several of these men stumble out from, and whatever else they happened to do with their time, these might be their homes.