Ugliness

An ex-pat friend commented the other day about his inability to explain how ugly our Japanese town is.
I had always thought the area was green, coastal, natural and beautiful, but found inner city sites to be scruffy, incongruous, dirty, and surreal. Part of the charm, for sure.
But, I realized what my friend was talking about was the dilapidated concrete structures built pell-mell with seemingly little inner-city planning, commercial on top of congested residential, with a higgledy-piggledy drunken web of power lines twisted together, strung dangling above any open trace of skyline.
Imagine having a powerline or cell phone tower or strip-cut mountain in every picture you ever wanted to take.
Without getting into the reasons for this, I found today driving through old town Tanabe that it takes a grittier perspective to appreciate the people and buildings and unaesthetically pleasing blur of the inner city. It takes the Blues.
I was listening to John Lee Hooker's "Decoration Day" and "Shout" and "Bang Bang Bang" while I wound through the old castle streets, seeing the bent older people shuffle, the wild-haired school-ditching youth, the old lady wringing her laundry, the grizzled fisherman ignoring traffic laws and weaving in and out to the port.
The hardwork and tedium, the laxadaisical "here I am whatfer" attitude became clearer to me.
I wish I had my camera today, and maybe I'll get around to adding pictures later.