Story and Photographs by Lehan Ramsay

This is the local Neighbouhood Association. They have a nice hall around the corner. People who around live here pay a few dollars each month. They come and collect the money in April. They do a lot, the Neighbourhood Association. They arrange for people to plant flowers and maintain them. They distribute bags for picking up garbage on the street. They keep a makeshift shed for people to take their recyclables, they make a little money off it. Once I asked for paper for my wood stove, and a few days later was told by my neighbour that I shouldn’t do that.

They have a bazaar once a year, and sell old things for a dollar or less, and they take a trip to a hot spring some time in the autumn. A newsletter goes around once a month, and you stamp the bottom of the front page to show that you’ve read it. Usually it has information about free medical checks, or some information for what to do in a particular situation.

Once I went to the annual meeting and was greeted warmly. I was planning to go to the next one, but my neighbour fell out with them and stopped telling me about things. My neighbour was organizing the bazaar and was quite involved. But the manager of the centre decided that he couldn’t work with her, and after some time she quit. When the next bazaar was coming up I went to volunteer again. Some time after my neighbour came to tell me that I was not required to volunteer, as she was no longer working for it. I came to understand that I had been grouped. It angered me that I wasn’t accepted as a volunteer, and I went there and shouted at them. That was very shocking to them. So now they simply ignore me.

This is an area where the young people have largely moved out, leaving retirees, and I am the youngest retiree. There are schools around; the elementary school is across the road. Why then do I so rarely see children? No children, no young people in the Neighbourhood Association.

The Neighbourhood Association has been a small peripheral part of my life here. I don’t think I’ve done a very good job of fitting in with it. It makes me feel old and a little unnecessary. It’s one part of Japan that has helped things stick together well. But it didn’t keep up with the times. Now more and more people live in apartment blocks and don’t bother to pay their monthly fees, don’t go to the bazaar, don’t help to plant the flowers. All that is left to the old people. The old people a little younger than those old people, in their sixties or early seventies, like to keep to themselves too.

These photos were taken at the annual rice cake (mochi) pounding party a few years ago.