Explore everyday life in Japan
If you venture off the main streets and enter into the meandering maze of side streets and backstreets that make up the residential areas of any Japanese city, you will come across a number of small shops, restaurants, and markets of various kinds which are often run out of the front rooms of the proprietors' houses. Sometimes, as you shop or eat, you will find yourself looking through the glass panes of sliding doors at the shop owners and their family sitting in their living room watching TV, reading newspapers, eating meals, etc.
If you find yourself walking through the market area of a covered arcade, you may be surprised to see that much of the stores' goods, sometimes even most of them, are displayed outside of the shops themselves, often on Styrofoam boxes and makeshift tables.
Though it is very common in many, if not most places, these days to buy fish, meat, and produce at supermarkets, Japan has retained a market culture in many places, meaning that you can still buy your groceries from neighborhood shops, markets, and vendors.
If you are out walking early in the morning, say five or five-thirty, you may find old men and old women, often bent over at the waist to almost ninety degrees from years of fieldwork, unloading fruits and vegetables that are both familiar and unfamiliar to you from their trucks and vans. In many cases, these fruits and vegetables are then simply displayed on blankets that have been set down on the sidewalk and are sold for cash only to people living in nearby neighborhoods.
This is an ongoing series that will explore various aspects of daily life in Japan. My hope is that this series will not only reveal to its followers, image by image, what Japan looks like, but that it will also inform its followers about unique Japanese items and various cultural and societal practices. If you are interested in getting regular updates about life in Japan, please consider following me at @boxcarblue. If you have any questions about life in Japan, please don’t hesitate to ask. I will do my best to answer all of your questions.