oh, yeah... i got great replies for my queries on YYH (thanks a
million to Jan Story! that was really helpful!) but the
explanation on where the gang lives quite boggled me....
(*mutters* great, now i have to get a map...) could someone give
me a simpler location? i do understand that they're really far
from nerima, but i didn't understand much about the towns and
stuff... explain to the ignorant, pls! ^_^;;
Jan digs out Tokyo map, magnifying glass, and tape measure... maps really
help, btw. The one I use is the Kodansha bilingual map of Tokyo, which we
got at Borders I think. They have a good maps department. I have a map of
Japan too -- it helps trying to figure out where Ryouga's been! ^_^
I *think* Nerima is about 30 km from the landmark I was using, Nihonbashi.
This is a very rough approximation, trying to convert scales from my big map
(which doesn't show Nerima at all) to the little inset (which does, but
doesn't have a scale on it) and also converting metric to my English tape
measure and back in my head, something I'm bad at. Anyway, it's
take-the-train distance.
As for "towns and stuff," Tokyo is the Urban Sprawl Capital of the World.
It has gradually engulfed a whole lot of little outlying burgs (Shinjuku,
for instance, was once outside the city limits). The city is divided into a
lot of wards (ku). If you know what to look for you can spot in different
anime where you are. Shinjuku, for instance, has the five central
skyscrapers and the "My City" building (seen in Ronin Warriors as well as
City Hunter). Tokyo Tower is in Minato-ku and I think I've found the park
where the Sailor Moon gang hangs out on my map. Nerima, all I've ever seen
of it in anime says "relentlessly mundane bedroom community" although a long
time ago a lot of anime studios used to be headquartered there. Joseph
Palmer has some photos on his page at
http://www.best.com/~jpalmer/fanfic/Nerima.shtml.
I haven't seen that much YYH (I shouldn't say that, I have all that's out on
fansub) and don't have the early manga. Most of my comments in this come
from the movie. It looks like they're in an older part of the city, a lot
of the buildings are in a more traditional style. The old "low city"
(shitamachi, sometimes mistranslated as "downtown" though Tokyo doesn't have
a downtown in the sense of a central business/financial/government/shopping
district) was always a working-class area, even when Tokyo was Edo. (Sorry
if I go on too much about history, I'm a Rurouni Kenshin nut and most of my
references *are* historical.)
In the movie, they go across a bridge with really distinctive lampposts,
that's kind of buried under a freeway overpass. (Photo at
http://hkuhist2.hku.hk/nakasendo/images/1-68-3.jpg) That's a real bridge
and a fairly important one, the Nihonbashi, and all distances from Tokyo are
measured from a point at its center and have been for centuries. Not too
far from the Nihonbashi is an area where there are a lot of important,
old-money-type businesses: the Bank of Japan, the Bank of Tokyo, the
Mitsukoshi department store -- I figure that's where those skyscrapers could
be. (Even though it's a darned funny place to put skyscrapers, that whole
area is laced with rivers and filled-in canals, and used to flood
periodically as well as not being all that stable in an earthquake.
Shinjuku is a better place to put tall buildings, but its five towers are
something almost any otaku would recognize and those aren't them. Anyway,
Shinjuku is a good 7 km from Nihonbashi, which is take-the-train distance
again.)
There's actually probably a lot of modern type buildings in the area. I did
an Altavista search on "Nihonbashi" and turned up a whole bunch of corporate
homepages, the Japan Grain Exchange, lots of stuff. And it's not all that
far from Ginza.
It seems kind of weird to think of "towns" as being inside wards inside
cities, but that's Tokyo for you.
Anyway, that's about as much as I can tell you without having actually
*been* there. I was hoping to find some photos online, street scenes and
stuff, but all the likely looking sites seemed to be down.
