Oshima kept journals of his musical practices, but most of the entries are natural observations, verbal descriptions of sounds or combinations of sounds, and childhood memories. In the notes made around the suspected recording time of his debut album, Cityfield, Oshima recalls the strict observance of offering practices maintained by the elders of his community as a child. He spends far more time on that subject than on the composition or the equipment used, and in one such entry talks about a more unusual practice that left an impression:
“ - not only to individual spirits of house or stone, not only laid upon family altars. Some would petition the forest before walking through it, address the field as they weaved their way across. I saw it often enough that I never questioned it. My friends thought it was superstition, and couldn’t prove to each other strongly enough how little weight they placed in the idea that a place was capable of showing mutual respect to a person. But I don’t think it was a coincidence that they avoided the shortcuts that put them deep among the trees or on the rocky banks of that slow-moving old river…”
Oshima then recalls feeling alienated, unwanted, and anonymous when his first computing job took him to Tokyo, a population center at least a thousand times larger than that of his youth. Then in a separate entry, describes his return to the city after some unspecified time away. In it, he talks for the first time about addressing the “Cityfield”, a philosophical entity sleeping in the subconscious of the entire city of Tokyo - an entity not unlike the kami of Japanese tradition. He describes gently tossing an orange out of the window of a moving train as a form of offering as he entered the city. Entries over the next six months - which corresponds with the believed creation of the album - show a gradually more positive outlook as Oshima got his feet on the ground in the still-new location…
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