You remember the other Fujioka? The one in Shizuoka prefecture?
I was all happy when I went there because it had the same kanji as the mountain. This Fujioka doesn’t - it has the (more common) kanji for wisteria. Apart from that one minor detail, however, my experience here was not at all unlike my experience in Shizuoka…

Tochigi’s Fujioka seemed to have been left behind by the inhabitants, much like the city of Boulder, Colorado in Stephen King’s The Stand. I’m not exaggerating when I say that I felt more than a teensy bit frightened wandering through the streets. Perhaps because I was reading The Stand at the time and I couldn’t help but imagine dead bodies in rocking chairs, on beds, in baths, slumped against the kitchen sink, sat atop the crapper and each and every single one of them in various puffy, bloated stages of decay. The place was as empty as get out, if that in and of itself is not an oxymoron.

I was most surprised by the number of older, more traditional buildings that pretty much outnumbered their modern equivalents. Probably has something to do with an aging population – the young ‘uns have all scarpered to Tokyo for the heady high octane mix of overcrowded trains, overcrowded streets, overcrowded housing, overcrowded shops and um, crushing summer heat. If they were still around, maybe they would have bulldozed the house Grandpappy was born in & built themselves something shinier.

I ate lunch in a playground that had obviously been built by someone who knew someone else who had a fair amount of concrete to use up before it went off. It’s also likely that the first someone has an interest in prisons. Atop twin concrete pyramids rested 4 poles providing support for a network of chains stretched between them all, linked up to a central observation tower where whichever kid was playing the prison guard at that moment could take potshots at whichever kid was being the escaping convict. There was even a maze to add that frisson of excitement that you can only get when you’re lost & a man with a uniform and a rifle is shooting at you. I’m sure you all know what I mean.

I spend rather too much time wondering about playgrounds in Japan; I’m not sure if they’re stranger than playgrounds back home. I’m also not sure if they’re designed by people who hate kids, love kids, or people who take lots of drugs, watch lots of kids’ TV and then put pen to paper – or if it’s a combination of all three. Playgrounds can be pretty tripped out places at the best of times…
Fujis remaining : 20
More pics at Flickr: Fujioka.

Don’t know what the 52 Fujis is about? Check this out.

It’s my first ever summer holiday since school: my new job (working at a high school) means I get one month of fully paid summer holiday. I do what any normal person would do – I take another job. I opt to spend two weeks in Gunma teaching kids English. It’ll be fun, I tell myself, and in most ways that matter it is – the kids are great, plus it gets me close to two Fujis that I can visit on my day off.

Like most everywhere else I went to in Gunma, Fujiyamashita is a place where nothing happens. It’s another of those Fujis. It looks like nothing has ever happened here, will ever happen here, and let’s be honest - could ever happen here.

I’m more than a bit disappointed. I was hoping for some kind of spiritual rebirth of the 52 after we hit the big three-oh. They’ve been a bit dry of late, a fact I mentioned to my spirit guide, Boy who Bends with One Eye, who agreed: “You need more shots of people. Even if it’s just you.”

The point he seems to be missing is that there are never any people at these Fujis – it’s going to be shots of just little old me if things keep up like this.

Fujiyamashita is a part of Kiryu City, a place that has a bit of history, and a bit of mythology, two things that shouldn’t really go hand in hand as much as they do. Once upon a time, it was the main area for sericulture (raising silkworms to you or I) and even made the standards for Tokugawa Ieyasu’s army. (You remember him, he got to be the big bossman of Japan instead of Takeda Shingen, and Kofu City will never forget it.) The story of how the silkworms came to be in little old Kiryu is where the mythology comes into play.

Way back when, there was a local lad who had exceeded the expectations everyone held for him- he’d learned to read & write, quite the feat for a farmer’s son at the time. The town had to send young men to work in the gardens at the Imperial Court every year, and this kid was considered good enough to go. Now, court was very much like high school – all the hot girls were bitches. Poem writing bitches, which is not really like high school, but you get the idea. One of these pleasant young ladies wrote a poem about our local lad, and he found it by accident. He wrote a charmingly scathing reply and everyone was dead impressed. In the end, there’s a fierce hip hop battle, his rhymes are tight, hers ain’t and he gets to marry her. Turns out her hobby is raising silkworms (takes all sorts, I guess) and when he brings her back to the arse end of nowhere to live, she doesn’t give off because he lets her bring her worms. The rest, as they say, is history.

I was expecting some kind of Fuji mountain related history too – the name Fujiyamashita means ‘under Fuji mountain’ and even has the same characters as the mountain itself. I tried looking up the hill beside the train station, and found nothing but mushrooms, cobwebs, and a couple of dilapidated shrines - one of which had a Mount Fuji shape above the door, that was to be pointed out to me later on by someone else. Lookit -

Shame there was no-one about to ask why.

Fujis remaining : 21
More pics at Flickr: Fujiyamashita.

Don’t know what the 52 Fujis is about? Check this out.

This video is stupendously good fun - all the tunes you hear at all the stations on the Yamanote line in Tokyo in a groovy retro gamer stylee.

Ninja Train, originally uploaded by [douglas japonicus].

In case anyone still had any doubts about whether pirates or ninjas were better, the little town of Iga Ueno in Mie prefecture puts forward its argument - the Ninja Festa 2008. JapaniCan describes it thus -

Wearing loaned ninja clothes, you can have an experience of learning ninja skills at ninja schools.

And you even get free travel on the Iga Tetsudo (see picture) if you’re dressed up like a ninja. Sweet.

Beat that pirates.

The Ninja Festa 2008 started on April 1st and runs until May 6th. Break out dem shurikens.

You can also see a rather mad video by going to the Iga City website here.

(WARNING: contains mind melting images of dogs dressed as ninja.)

Owing to staff shortages, Mount Fuji will be closed to climbers this summer - but only on Sundays. The authorities have been having trouble finding people willing to spend the whole season on the mountain, and so have decided to restrict access on Sundays. This effectively means that those who want to do a weekend climb have to be off the mountain by midnight on Saturday, although the most detailed news report I found made no mention of penalties. Perhaps they’ll leave you stranded up there…

I’m also not sure if this means the Self Defence Forces will have to find somewhere else to train as well, although to be honest, no-one really cares about them. Especially North Korea.

(more info here.)

Japan is internationally renowned for its love of cute. This is oft exaggerated, but isn’t entirely without merit. What is often missed is the side effect of this obsession, whereby nearly every business, organization, event - or indeed, just about anything - irrespective of size or purpose, seeks to get itself a mascot.

The Aichi expo had these guys -

The Japanese police have this guy -

Hikone Castle has this guy -

The Japanese military settled, famously, on this guy (the one on the left, who won’t be fingerprinted on coming to Japan) -

Nara, one of Japan’s most popular tourist destinations, site of the ancient capital, and famous for deers and temples, didn’t have a mascot. This oversight needed correcting, obviously, so the city government contracted themselves a nifty looking logo that they thought would sum up the charms of their city as cutely as possible.

This is what they got -

According to Yahoo news, there have been a few complaints that it isn’t cute enough. I’m inclined to agree.

source - Yahoo news (only Japanese)