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52 Fujis # 7 - Fujioka

Yay! Another Fuji with the same kanji as the mountain - 富士.

Except this place is inexplicably named 富士岡, which means ‘fuji hill’, posing some complex questions for someone like me, who’s not really up on much. Does this mean you can see Fuji from a hill in the area? (Not today, you couldn’t.) Does it perhaps mean that the 1000 warriors of legend who swarmed up the actual Fuji to burn a letter for Princess Kaguya made a stopover here first, looked around and decided that the hill just wasn’t big enough?

I have no idea.

I do know that the whole 52 Fujis thing is starting to freak me out. I’ve yet to hear “Duelling Banjos” (or “Duelling Shamisen” as it’s more apt to be known around here) but every time I venture out to a Fuji I’ve never been to before, I feel like I’m stepping closer and closer towards some weird confrontation with an aggravated local, who’s not too keen on them there city folk. Imagine, if you will, a sleepy town, a place for which the word siesta might have been invented, had it not been situated on the other side of the world from Spain. You live here. You’re watering your plants, and look up to see a portly foreign man strolling up the street, taking snaps of objects you have seen every day of your life. This is weird.

Of course, this is just my paranoia, which wasn’t helped at all by the cashier in Fujioka’s Yaohan (a Yaohan with a delightfully old school sign). She was terrified of me, for some reason best known to only herself, and this put me on edge as I wandered aimlessly around the eerily quiet town of Fujioka, looking for somewhere to sit down and eat my lunch. I found a small clearing beside the road, swarming with bugs, and sat down to munch, in the shadow of a memorial to something I know nothing about. Just a little bit further down the road, the new Tomei expressway was being worked on, and people were probably doing overtime in the Ricoh factory, but all was cool and quiet in my world.

On my way back to the station, I discovered that the Church of the Sub-Genius have a tobacco shop in Fujioka:

I saluted Bob, took his picture, and then realized that this was perhaps the reason the cashier had been so scared of me - she had thought I was a sub-genius. Although I doubt she confused me with the holy Bob Dobbs himself; he’s infinitely more dashing.