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)

Remember Gunkanjima? The little rock in the ocean, off the coast of Nagasaki, that once saw duty as a coal mining town? No? Well, you can review the original post from way back when here, and perhaps you might want to take a look at the wikipedia entry here. It’s a beautiful, haunting place, a testament to how we interact with our environment and what happens when we just stop.

It would look really, really good filled with zombies.

Something more grounded in reality, and a lot more moving than that suggestion can be found below - a video taken when someone who grew up on the island in its heyday goes back to see the ruins. Stunning, moving and fascinating.

via videosift.com

Once upon a time, there was a world where you couldn’t buy a piece of plastic that had a microchip embedded in it. In this world before IC cards, you had to allow yourself enough time to buy a ticket when you went to the train station.

Seriously, who has time for that? No-one, that’s who. So some bright spark came up with the precursor to the IC card - commuter passes. Pieces of plastic, it is true, but flexible! Bendy! No microchip! And best of all, they came in all manner of varieties. With pretty designs.

Sadly, the convenience of the IC card behemoths, Suica & Passmo, means the end of these commuter passes - it’ll all be over come the 14th of March. Which is a shame, as I’d just started collecting them.

Here’s a little gallery of the ones I’ve gathered to date.

Slideshow

A kirin - or qilin - is a mythical beast, orginally from China, who brings luck and prosperity wherever it goes. Somewhere along its colourful path through history, it managed to get itself confused with the giraffe, in case anyone was wondering about the modern meaning of the Japanese word. Interestingly, Kirin brewery like to play for both teams; their Kirin Lemon brand of lemonade features a lemon with a giraffe’s head as its character. The qilin shows up on the product I myself am most acquainted with - the various beers that Kirin are probably most famous for.

What then is this secret of which I speak?

Next time you’re out and you see Kirin’s qilin logo, have a closer look. For the beast bears three tattoos upon its back, spelling out its name: there’s a キ(ki), a リ(ri)　and a ン(n). Now, the only one that’s easy to find is the first one - it’s nestled just behind the qilin’s ear. The other two? Well, I did a rough approximation and I’m not even sure I got them right. Hard to tell on a low pixel shot like this -

You’ll just have to check yourself - before you sink the third one.

My father-in-law’s company keeps a hotel, just for employees, in Fukui prefecture. This isn’t unusual in Japan, and there are probably other hotels dotted around the country where the workers can go and get some down time at a discount. This hotel is very old - we were among the last guests to stay there, as it was decided that the past New Year’s holiday will be the hotel’s last.

All very sad stuff. But what does it have to do with the 52 Fujis?

Simply put, I went on a short break to Fukui, visited 2 of the 52 and got 2008 off to a cracking start.

There were, however, some interesting developments.

We arrived late on the 31st of January - too late for me to walk the forty minutes into Tsuruga city, hop on a train and go exploring the wilds of Fukui in the dark in what were fast becoming sub-zero temperatures. It was decided it was best to leave it until the morning. After dinner, my wife’s family essentially took over and organized everything for me. It was fantastic - like having a combined office staff and cheer leading squad who get most upset when my hand doesn’t hold a beer. It was decided that come the next morning - New Year’s Day - everyone else would visit Eihei temple at the end of the Echizen Tetsudo Katsuyama Eiheiji line, four or five stops after Higashi-Fujishima. Proposals were drawn up whereby I would be left at the station and then meet up with them later at Eiheiji. Grand.

Overnight, it snowed, casting doubt on the rail worthiness of the trains & also the the wisdom of spending time outside a station in rural Japan in the grip of winter. Everyone was quite sure that this wasn’t something I would want to be doing, although I wasn’t actually asked - an unforeseen drawback of having an eight person strong support team. So it came to pass that I arrived and left the first of this year’s 52 Fujis in a car, kind of disrupting the spirit of the 52 a little. This isn’t something I’m particularly upset about - the fact of the matter is, Higashi-Fujishima is another in a long line of Fujis which adhere to the noble tradition of being in the arse-end of nowhere.

Mind you, it had nothing on Fujii, the next day’s Fuji. Fujii is on the Obama line, and wasn’t as Baroque as the name implies. Quite the opposite in fact - the Obama line has one train every two hours; and at some point, the line splits into two. The fortunate souls who live at either end of these later lines have the privilege of getting a train every four hours; car ownership is probably quite high round their way.

I was kind of taken with Fujii station and the cheerful rainbow daubed on the outside of the shelter on the platform. I liked the lane that led up to it, sloping off into ditches and rice fields on either side. I liked that the only other cars were those dinky little trucks that are favoured by farmers. (You can get a feel for it by checking out this panoramic shot from outside the station.) This was truly the most inaccessible Fuji to date, and if you let it, the romanticism of it all could just get too much : I had a daydream about buying a house here living under the watchful eye of those hills, curving lazily into the sky. Winter would be a non-stop carnival of snowball fights, sledding, and eating stew by a roaring fire, with a whiskey to follow.

Then I remembered what happens in The Shining, got back into the car, and settled back down into the long road trip back to civilization.

Fujis remaining : 24
More pics at Flickr: Higashi-Fujishima and Fujii.

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