Jogging Urayasu Zary Fekete   © Copyright 2024 by Zary Fekete

Photo by Kate Trifo at Pexels

The jogging path in Urayasu is one of the politest places in the city. It runs like a handshake between the apartment blocks and the sea wall, a ribbon of asphalt that seems always to be apologizing for existing. The path makes room for everyone…mothers pushing strollers, boys on scooters, couples in lockstep with their matching track suits. When you jog it, you feel yourself being absorbed into an orderly river of motion, neither hurried nor slow, always adjusting. Even the cyclists ding their bells softly, like excuses.

The apartments lean back from the path in careful rows, the balconies fitted with laundry racks that reach like open palms. Towels hang like flags, shirts stiffening in the salted wind, futons sagging over the rails. On weekends you see men out watering the planters on the balconies, their cheap hoses arcing water into geraniums and tomatoes. Elderly women sweep the entranceways with small brooms, even when there is almost nothing to sweep. If you run here long enough, you notice the rhythm of the neighborhood itself…the way it folds into the industrial district ahead and the reclaimed land beyond.

Before Urayasu became an orderly sprawl of towers and factories, it was a fishing village. The locals once pushed narrow boats into the shallow waters and pulled up seaweed and clams. Old photographs show boys in shorts with their hair slicked back, balancing along narrow piers. Now the shoreline has been pulled forward, squared off with concrete, filled in with earth brought by trucks from elsewhere. Where there were once tides, there are now gridded blocks. Even the memory of water feels rationed, contained inside canals that run like ditches through the streets.

Still, traces surface. On some mornings, you smell it…the faint stink of fish rising from a corner where a drain lets out. At the edge of a small shrine, tucked between towers, there’s a carved stone turtle blackened with soot. And at the community festivals, the children carry paper fish on sticks, as if honoring what they’ve never seen.

Jogging farther out, the air grows heavier with industry. The striped smokestack announces itself before you can see it, a barber pole painted in warning colors. At its base stand warehouses with tin roofs, the sort that shudder in the wind. You catch glimpses of workers in blue coveralls, some with cigarettes dangling from their lips. Their conversations spill into the road…gruff, rhythmic, interrupted by laughter. A forklift backs up with its bleating alarm, and for a moment you jog past an entire world that has no need of you. The factories hum like insects, each with its own pitch, blending into a mechanical chorus.

It’s odd, then, that the same train line that serves the factories also delivers families in bright T-shirts and mouse ears. Tokyo Disney sits only a stop away, as if someone spliced in a scene from another country. The jogging path carries you close enough to glimpse the hotels with their false turrets, their pasted-on fantasies. On clear afternoons, you can even hear the distant squeals from the roller coasters, mixed with the thrum of trucks from the industrial yard. You jog through the seam between two imaginations…one of toil, the other of escape. Both are rehearsed performances, both demanding in their own ways.

And always, just beyond, there is the sea. You don’t see it until you climb the levee, but you sense it…the flatness, the way the air grows brighter, saltier. The levee itself is a line of defense: stone piled on stone, a wall not so much built as insisted into being. On one side lies the city’s neat reclamation, its roads and towers; on the other, the long restless water. Joggers and walkers climb the steps and stand there, looking outward as if to confirm the deal still holds.

The deal did not always hold. In 2011, when the earthquake came, Urayasu shook loose. The filled-in earth liquefied, turned soft as porridge. Roads buckled. Manholes rose like startled turtles from the pavement. Whole sidewalks shifted sideways into the air. I’ve heard stories of bicycles sinking into mud as if swallowed, of neighbors standing ankle-deep in what had been a park. The city spent years stitching itself back together, and yet even now you can see the faint scars in the pavement, a line that doesn’t quite match, a patch that refuses to stay level. People walk over them with the same politeness they bring to everything…acknowledging without pointing.

Jogging here, you feel that earthquake like a ghost, the way the earth could betray its borrowed surface. The apartments look solid, the factories purposeful, Disney eternal in its costumes…but beneath is only mud, patient, waiting. Perhaps that is why the levee feels both necessary and insufficient, a wall built more for faith than for certainty.

As you turn back along the path, you notice details you missed on the way out. A father teaching his daughter how to balance on a bike; she wobbles, shrieks, then laughs. A delivery worker bowing slightly as he hands off a package, his cap dipping like punctuation. A group of schoolchildren with yellow hats crossing the street in a line, each holding the shoulder of the one in front. The city choreographs itself in small gestures, and you jog through as both participant and audience.

By the time you near the apartments again, the light has shifted. Laundry snaps on the balconies. Someone’s radio leaks an enka ballad into the street, sad and strong. The politeness of the path reasserts itself…you slow to let an elderly couple pass, you step aside for a boy running full tilt toward nothing in particular. And you realize that in a city that was once sea, politeness is another kind of levee, holding everything in place against the threat of collapse.

Maybe that’s why, as you finish your run, you think not of the fantasy castle at Disney, nor of the factories with their endless hum, but of the water itself…its patience, its insistence. The true magic kingdom here is not the one built on tickets and parades. It’s the kingdom that waits beneath, the one that could return at any time. And yet, for now, people hang their laundry, sweep their entrances, and jog politely along the levee, as if faith and order might hold the tide.