My first Japanese sunrise

Four o'clock. That's when my brain decided it was time for me to get up and moving this morning. Four o'clock. It's enough to make a man jab a stick in there or something just to enforce some discipline...

I've just returned from a walk around the neighborhood. The Benjamin arriving in Japan this time around is a very different man than the one who took his first steps in a foreign land back in March of 2003. Then, I also awoke early my first morning and went for a quick walk around the block - four hours later I found my apartment again. Five years and a lot of experience later, I know how to make my crippled brain do something similar to navigating. I walk away from the apartment, note what's on every corner, then walk back. Once I've done that in every direction, I can start turning once or twice at intersections, then retracing my steps. It's painstaking, but I've learned that this is pretty much the only way I can find a place.

Especially in Japan. Neighborhood streets here have no names, and the house numbers are assigned (I have been told) according to the order in which building permits are issued city wide. If you invite someone to your home in Japan, it is customary to draw a map at least from the nearest street large enough to have a name. You have to file such a map with the emergency services, also, so that they can find your home in an emergency. Presumably they use GPS now, but when I registered my address in Kyoto the hand-drawn maps were still a requirement.