last week's trip
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-eight years and a million words
I've got my film back and scanned for last week's trip. (Yes, I still shoot film, along with a bunch of other greybeards.)
Mari and I took Ken to the Japanese city of Fukuoka last week for the wedding of Mari's friend Rie. After the wedding, we took the train from Fukuoka through the mountains in the north-eastern part of the island of Kyushu and spent some time in the onsen town of Yufuin.
I love train trips through mountains (my favourite probably being the Garmisch-Innsbruck trip through the Alps) and this one didn't disappoint. One of the really breathtaking scenes was breaking out of a tunnel into a high ravine and finding one ridge above us studded with wind turbines. There was also a local curiosity in the way that hay was stacked in carefully arranged layered piles so that each layer fanned out from the centre to the periphery in a way that I suppose shed water.
One of the limitations of a train trip through the mountains, of course, is the inability to frame photos. So I missed photographing both of the above-mentioned scenes. While I did manage a few halfway decent landscape shots where the landscape was more open, there were inevitably some distracting features in the foreground. Japan is the only country in the world that approaches my native Canada for sheer numbers of signs dotting roadsides, and the telephone and power cabling has to be seen to be believed. I don't really mind these, as they add a bit of character.
Another interesting site was an abandoned roundhouse, situated as far as I could see fairly far from any other rail infrastructure such as repair facilities. I managed a blurry snap of the thing, though. As with so much of Japan's infrastructure in the countryside, it's been left to crumble into complete dereliction without any seeming interest in knocking it down, reusing the materials or property, or even roping it off for children. Then again there really aren't too many children in the Japanese countryside, so maybe derelict buildings really don't pose much of a problem.
