The Day it Snowed on the Neighbor’s House

An out-of-place scene in Tokyo nowadays, this Showa Era house’ days are surely numbered. The owner is an elderly lady in her late 80s or early 90s. It has a big, beautiful garden out back from which she gets loads of persimmons every fall (she hires someone to pick them). Sometimes she puts extra persimmons out front in a box with a sign that invites people to take them freely. I am sure real estate developers would love to have that land to build yet another cookie-cutter concrete apartment building. I am sure that within a decade, they will have the chance.

The new eight story cookie-cutter concrete apartment building is now going up. Both she and her house and garden full of persimmon trees are gone. Small Town Tokyo: Himonya