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I said I was planning to come out of the gates at full tilt in 2020, and I meant it.

One of my favourite things about rail travel in Japan is the seishun juhachi kippu, which roughly translates as “youth 18 ticket”. For three brief periods of time throughout the year, you can get one of these and get unlimited travel throughout Japan on JR lines… as long as you only use local trains. This makes for super cheap journeys if you do it right. If you want to get the most value out of it, you’re going to have to love sitting on trains: from where I live to Fuji #44 is 344km (215 miles). It took me 7 hours to get there, with 5 or 6 transfers.

So with a pretty solid itinerary planned out, my seishun in hand, and just enough crazy to think any of this was a good idea, the next Fuji mission of 2020 was codenamed: “2 The Frozen North”

(I did the 2 like that because that’s what all the cool kids have been doing ever since the sequel to The Fast & The Furious came out.)

2 The Frozen North (no I’m not going to change it, so shhhhh) featured three of the most isolated Fujis, scattered about the northern prefectures of Japan: Fujita in Fukushima, Fujishima in Yamagata & Fujine in Iwate.

First up, Fujita, which while not altogether a heaving metropolis of human activity, had a couple of things in the surrounding area that piqued my curiosity. I needed to be careful about straying too far from my plan, as trains were, shall we say, infrequent:

There’s a cultural centre close to the station that I thought might be worth a look. It had an interesting design, but felt like yet another boondoggle that I seem to keep bumping into on these Fuji expeditions. (See the gallery below if you’re curious.)

The park next door had some beautiful scenery, some ducks, and most amazingly, tucked away on the right here …

… a Fuji shrine?!

This was made all the more amusing by the fact that the kanji for Fujita is for wisteria, not the mountain. Yet here we were, with a little place of worship for everybody’s favourite dormant stratovolcano.

There wasn’t really much else to see, however, my inner twelve year old loved this closed down hair salon:

(It’s probably meant to be read and pronounced as ‘FUNNY’ with a bit of an American accent, so maybe we should stop sniggering.)

Once back at the station, I decided to buy a drink to warm my hands up. Also in the vending machine? Apple juice made with Fuji apples.

An auspicious start to this mission north.

FUJIS LEFT AT THE END OF JANUARY 5th, 2020:

16/60