Right Here, Right Here

From the time I got off the bus to the time I reached the foot of the bridge, I met almost no one.

I was at last standing right in front of it, and the opening segment didn't appear to be as steep a climb as I had imagined. Maybe the steep part came after the tollgate, which the car that had just zipped past me was about to pass through. I couldn't find the entrance to the pedestrian walkway, so I walked down the sidewalk that ran alongside the IKEA that had been built right next to the bridge. The IKEA parking lot was mostly empty, but I could see the figures of people on the store's shuttle bus when it came by.

The bridge was almost two kilometers long, leading to the Ōsakakō area on the other side. I had taken the city bus across it many times. It was neither a suspension nor a truss bridge, but rather was entirely supported by an alarmingly small number of piers; from certain angles, the roadbed appeared to be hovering in midair. Every time the bus climbed that sharp gradient, I would feel a sense of elation just as though I were lifting off on the Railroad to the Milky Way. Whoooaaa, just like a sightseeing plane! At its highest point, the bridge is 45 meters above the water. There aren't any tall buildings around it, and the fencing is low, so there is nothing at all to get in the way of the view—you can see all of Osaka from the top. The view is probably even better than the ones from the observation decks on towers and skyscrapers that you have to pay to get into.

I knew that you could walk across it. All of the bridges around here were more than 30 meters above the water, so that the ships could get to the industrial areas, but if you were looking to go to the top of one of them, this was the tallest and longest.

The sky was overcast in a mottled pattern, to the point that I didn't know where the sun was. The low-slung clouds were the very ones that brought the rains of winter. Ahead was the entrance ramp to the pedestrian walkway, in a fenced-in area underneath the bridge where it started to rise above the ground. The wire fencing had turned black from rust and exhaust fumes. There was no crosswalk leading from here to the pedestrian entrance facing the other side of the road, but there was also virtually no traffic down here. I walked across to the entrance to the ramp, where I took my camera out of my backpack and took off my gloves.

The pedestrian ramp snaked this way and that under the rise of the bridge. It felt familiar to me. When I was a child, I would make my way to swimming classes every week via a pedestrian walkway under the Hanshin Expressway that connected to a different ward of Osaka on the other side of the water, and a little farther upstream from that was a bridge I would occasionally cross on my way home from high school. With my nylon bag from the swimming school on my back, I would peer over the railing at the surface of the water far below. The green river didn't offer the least bit of visibility, but still I would see the scary dark shadows of fish; they looked like they were monsters from Ultraman, creatures with the power to suddenly change shape. Their black legion whorled in continuous pursuit of itself. Underneath that ramp were abandoned bicycles and a scrapyard. The factories close by either side of the highway were always dimly lit, and there were almost never other people there.

Compared to that, the view from here—of a parking lot down below with brand-spanking-new cars, and an endless expanse of empty land on both sides—was already a good deal happier. The pedestrian ramp twisted right and left...