52 Fujis #17 and #18 - Fujimatsu & Fujikawa(Aichi)

The final two Fujis this week find themselves thrown together, once more through necessity rather than any real link. Although, one could argue that as they are both to be found on the Meitetsu line between Nagoya and Toyohashi, and neither of them are a stopping point for the express trains, that this would be connection enough.

On the way to Fujimatsu, I happened to encounter one of the mentally ill people who are so common on the railways in Japan. This guy gave a new spin to the concept - he didn’t play a tambourine (like the guy on the trainline that goes to my work) and he didn’t talk to himself (much). What he did do was pull out a calculator and start riffing on numbers that probably only had any connection in his mind. Last I saw of him, he was standing on the stairs at some station, his eyes glued to the numbers that are embossed on the side of every Meitetsu line carriage.

Thirty minutes later, I was in Fujimatsu.

Fujimatsu is that interesting blend of rural that is terribly Japanese - in other words, it is and it isn’t. With express trains barreling through the entire landscape every 4 minutes, you’d think that pretty much disqualified it from the rural category. And yet… A sleepy Sunday morning, kids out with their dad walking the dog next to rice fields, the old folk making their way to temple on dilapidated old bicycles, a monk calling the faithful to worship with some incomprehensible chant that just reminds me of my wedding when the priest read out my hometown address. In the most frightening of voices.

The whole town has this feeling that the modern world may have cleaved a path through it, but there’s not a scratch on their traditions. Which is all well and good.

Onward to Fujikawa, which I had been informed might prove interesting, as it used to be a station town way back in the days of yore, when the original Tokaido line was the in thing. (The Tokaido line now refers to the train line that stretches along the coast, both the shinkansen and the local trains, but it used to be the main road from Tokyo to the west of Japan.) Sadly, it didn’t live up to any of my expectations. There were some monuments to the glory days hither and thither - hey, look at us, we used to be important! - but the station didn’t even have a toilet. (I really needed to go, so perhaps this didn’t help my overall impression of the place.) I was planning on hanging around for a couple of hours, but owing to the bladder issue, I curtailed this. I curtailed it still further when it became clear that there was nothing to do in the place other than - perhaps - go hiking. Oh well. If only there had been a place to turf my bags, I might have stayed. And gone for a pee in the woods. Who knows what I would have found…

Perhaps a real tiger:

Fujis remaining : 34
More pics at Flickr: Fujimatsu.
Fujikawa.

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Thursday, February 1st, 2007 52 Fujis, Japan Trackback URL for this entry