The East View
As a consequence of the timing of our move, we are seeing very little of the view from the new apartment. This is now tsuyu, or the rainy season. As a result, our view tends to be like this most of the time:
However, the view has cleared up from time to time–we saw the moonrise the other night, for example, made even nicer by the effect of some occluding clouds.
A few times, we’ve had a nice nighttime view, aided by the fact that lights penetrate the haze better. Here’s the view to the east, the same direction as the hazy photo above (click to enlarge):
However, there’s a cool little thing we didn’t count on: Kasai Rinkai Park. That’s the place where I go birdwatching sometimes. It has a big, lit-up ferris wheel, which by chance happens to be completely visible from our window; tall buildings stand in the way just to the left and to the right, but of the ferris wheel, we have a clear, open view. In the above photo, you can’t see it (even in the enlarged version), but if you look just to the right of the building with the construction tower, you’ll see a group of bright buildings. Zoomed in, it looks like this (click to enlarge):
The buildings to the left are still a bit of a mystery, but looking at my map book, Akihabara Electric Town happens to be smack in that direction, so I’m guessing that that’s what those buildings are. Here is the tightest zoom on the ferris wheel.
One of the nice things about it is that the lights change on it, like a giant neon wheel. They iris open, they spin, they luminesce in red, blue, green, purple, and white. And it’s not as tiny as the wide view above would suggest; with the naked eye, you can make out detail about like the second to last image above. Kind of a cool fringe benefit to the view.
This has another upside to it: Kasai Rinkai is on the far eastern edge of Tokyo, about twice as far away from us as the Sumida River–and the Sumida River is where one of the nicer fireworks displays is held every year. Since we can see Kasai Rinkai, that means anything that distant will be nicely visible to us. The possible bad news: like with Fuji, we might have blockage. The Sumida display might be just blocked out by that building with the construction crane on top of it. As far as I can figure from the map, the display will be either just behind or just to the left of the left edge of that building. Why can’t our building be the only tall one around here?!?
But there will be other displays almost as visible in that week. Tuesday, July 24 is the Katsushika fireworks display on the Edo River, and Thursday, July 28 is the Adachi Ward fireworks display on the Arakawa River; both of these are visible north of the Sumida display, and hopefully one of them won’t be blocked by some other building. I am beginning to wonder if we should have paid an extra ¥8,000 a month for that 26th floor apartment with the same layout, after all… but nah.
We’ll have to see what comes around.