New Place

Some of the work I did recently on Chiba-shi in the early 1950's reminded me of that time in my own life. We'd been living in a pre-fab - an old RAF Nissen hut on the edge of an airfield, where a lot of families from bombed out Teesside had been given temporary accommodation after World War II. Then my dad got a job as a rent collector on a new public housing estate in Middlesborough - Berwick Hills. Dread to think what the old place is like now, probably a real 'sink estate', I must go and take a look when I'm in England next time.

Anyway, the thing that was going through my mind was walking with my parents on a grey Sunday afternoon around an area where some new roads had been laid in a field. There must have been a plan to extend housing in that direction, but so far only the drains and kerbs and tarmac had been laid. It was a 'New Place', former pasture sprouting mainly 'Old Man's Beard' and thistles.

Being born just after the war didn't seem unusual at the time but I can see now that it was very unusual - there was something that all the older people around you shared that was no part of your innocent experience. So with this 'field with roads' for example, it was a kind of opening to a future. Somewhere nice for people to live, the world was being transformed, it made you happy to see the new drain covers shining in the rain. On a shoebox at that time - 'Startrite'? - there was a picture of a boy and a girl walking hand in hand along a straight road with a dark pine forest on each side, and that was the whole feeling of this 'New Place'. It pointed to some utopia that was just around the corner. And as a young child you could really sense this, in fact although you didn't know it you were one of the key actors in all this. Bad times were gone and new times were represented by new roads in new places.

I can see that it must have been the same here in leafy Chiba-ken. The Kawasaki Steel plant being built along the foreshore, cheap wooden apartments being put up for the workers and their families. The dark night had passed, and there was no alienation yet between people and place, workers and the product of their labour.

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!