We spend our morning in Ku 1 as always, and after lunch, Sakai escorts me directly to Ku 6, the Japanese Ward. I haven’t been here since I was little. Emerging from the transitway station, colorful signs, blinking with bright orange, red, and blue displays or white backlit kanji, hiragana, and katakana, jut out from every building.
Ku 6 is even more busy than my Ku 9 ward, and the lack of English makes my head swirl. People swarm around us to get down to the transitway platform before the station chimes end, jostling my shoulder and politely murmuring excuses as they descend. I step off to the side and press my back against a building covered in a graffiti-style mural, two white kodama ghosts at the base of a thick tree.