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These two Fujis are, according to my notes, not much to write home about.

If the previous two Fujis were grouped together by geography, these two are grouped together by necessity – there isn’t much you can say about either of them individually.

Fujinami was a huge station with no apparent need to be so big. It stands as a testament to the Meitetsu commitment to consistency, a doppelganger of half a dozen or more stations in Hamamatsu. Fujinami seemed to be a new town and so I didn’t hang around. I wasn’t very much in the mood for photographing the post office and there was little else of note, if I’m being honest.

One thing I do like about Fujinami is that it is one of three stations with that name in Japan – there’s another in Wakayama, and there used to be one in Ishikawa, on an old branch line which is now abandoned. To be fair, the characters used to write the station names are different but, hey, close enough.

The next station on our list, Fujigaoka, is also something of a name sharer – there’s a Fujigaoka in Kanagawa. There’s also a Fujioka, a Kita Fujioka, a Gakunan Fujioka, a Fujimigaoka, and that one in Gunma, cleverly called Gunma Fujioka. So you can imagine there’s not a whole lot to distinguish this place.

Well, Fujigaoka was a nice place. I had a nice pizza here in a nice pizza place. A strange man was nice to me as I came out of the nice station – he nicely said to me “Hello! Welcome to Japan!” in a nice voice. There’s a monorail in Fujigaoka, in addition to the HigashiYama line (one of Nagoya’s subway lines). I think the monorail goes to a new town, which looks like (from the map) it was built on either reclaimed land or a dried up riverbed. I could be wrong. Either way, everything at this end of Nagoya seems to be frightfully nice and terrifyingly nondescript.

Much like Nagoya itself, which I have never really developed any kind of an affinity for, I’m afraid. Some people love it, I hear.

FUJIS LEFT AT THE END OF JANUARY 27th, 2007: 43/59