Retaining wall
I took this picture on Sunday, June 4, 2017. Every day, in all seasons and weathers, I walk up this hill. In the autumn the leaves of the ginkgo trees on the left turn yellow and it looks pretty in the low-angle afternoon autumn sunlight. The cement wall on the right is the retaining wall of a public high school property at the top of the hill, across the street from my apartment. I have been told that in olden days the land at the top of the slope - which today is the high school’s sports ground regularly filled with happy, shouting girls and boys - used to be an execution field. That was in the time when jailers practiced gratuitous torture to inflate punitive suffering before lopping the condemneds' heads off with a samurai sword. I don’t know if that’s true, but it’s a great story. The street, called Nakano dori, was cut into the slope of the hill, leaving the high school exposed and protected/supported by a heavy retaining wall. This picture is looking South. The slope is actually part of a river valley made by the Kanda River which flows through my neighbourhood about 50-meters behind where I am standing when I took this picture. At the base of the slope the wall is quite high - maybe eight meters. Then it tapers as you ascend the slope until the wall is just 1.3-meters on my street. Until a few weeks ago this wall was largely covered with clinging vines. I watched as a Nakano City crew scraped the cement clean. I kind of like the wall.