i was reading kansai scene in the office today, and spotted many punctuation, grammatical and formatting errors in the magazine. such time did i have that i wrote a letter to the editor, with a list of the errors i spotted. i wonder if i will get a reply, and if i do, what it will be. the magazine, though, now has some new writers whom i think i quite like. let’s just hope they improve their copyediting.
anyway, there was this article on Hankyu railway celebrating its 100th anniversary, and included several interesting pieces of information:
Umeda （梅田）got its name because:
Hankyu Railway’s predecessor bought the area, filled it (umeru, in Japanese) and called it Umeda, using the characters for fill and field (埋田. The first character was later changed to the more romantic plum (梅).
Also, i’d always thought that Hankyu and Hanshin are rival railway companies, but it turns out that they had been rivals; the former bought over the latter about 4 years ago to form Hankyu Hanshin Holdings, Inc.
Finally, want to know where some of the most expensive real estate in Kansai are located? They’re “north of the (Hankyu) Kobe Line between Nishinomiya-Kitaguchi and Rokko station”. I do know that many diplomats live in the Nishinomiya area, but am not familiar enough with Hyogo Prefecture’s geography to verify if the two facts do match up.
Can anyone enlighten me?
