Thoughts from home

I am here at my parents' condo, where they have lived on and off since 1971.  It is essentially the only permanent home I have known growing up.  My dad was an expat so we spent a lot of time out of the country but this place has remained constant.  There is a shopping area about 15 minutes away.  I remember when it was just a little branch of a big department store really in the middle of nowhere. I used to pass through it to get home from school and we used to break school rules and cut through for the air conditioning in the summer, the heater in winter.  It has now grown into a two building luxury shopping mall with many designer boutiques and shoppers who travel there as a destination.  Now they are in another phase of development with major construction going on all around the train station.  I take the back roads to get there from my parents' and I was struck today by the changes.  It used to be a really sleepy place, sure the occasional house would get knocked down to be replaced by a mini condo but that was the extent of it.  But this trip, I almost got lost going to the mall because of all the unfamiliar buildings.  Where there used to be a lumberyard, there is this large grey building with a parking lot.  All of a sudden, there are sidewalks on that side of the street, where there never were any.  Of course all this didn't happen overnight, but I haven't been home in 14 months.  There is a huge grey building which I think is the parent to the grey building that I passed, I'm not sure what that's going to be.  Where am I going with this?  I guess it's not that unusual for things to change and for areas to be developed and not recognise where you were brought up.  But for me, it didn't happen in the 80's when all of Tokyo went nuts duing the bubble and it didn't happen in the following 20 years.  I'm afraid the next time I come home, I really won't recognise where I used to sneak ice cream cones on the way home with my friends (the school rule stated no detours on the way home and certainly no going into shops in our uniforms).  I haven't been back at my school since I left in 1975, I really don't think I could find my way there any more.  Tokyo is an ever changing city, and that change has finally reached my little neighbourhood.