Enoden Stations : EN13 – Yuigahama

The Enoden links Fujisawa & Kamakura via a coastal route that gives both those cities access to the little island of Enoshima – hence the name. It’s a charming, old-fashioned trainline, with some really interesting sights to be seen along the way.

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Local Sights

Like a lot of these sleepy little stations on the Enoden there’s a lot more underneath the surface than is at first apparent.

There’s the Kamakura Museum of Literature, set in a gorgeous old villa overlooking the sea.

Down by that sea, there’s Tankoro – an old Enoden street car who used to run about the place all on his own. (I mean without any additional cars attached, not that he is autonomous. That would be daft.) Apparently, you can sometimes get inside to nose about but well… pandemic?

The beach itself for which the station is named – Yuigahama – is the site upon which the previously mentioned Nitta Yoshisada had his final battle with the defending Hojo forces of Kamakura in 1333. It’s also the execution site of the Soga brothers – well, the first execution site, in 1182. Yoritomo let them off here and they ended up getting their revenge 11 years later on the man who killed their father, just like Inigo Montoya.

All About EN13 Yuigahama Station

Yuigahama is an interesting spot. If you get off the train at Yuigahama Station and head down to the beach for which it is named, you’ll find that the beach itself stretches all the way down past a road that’ll take you up to Wadazuka Station; a bit farther past that, and it’s a ten or fifteen minute walk into Kamakura city centre.

This elongated stretch of sand that links Yuigahama to Kamakura, a parallel track to the Enoden itself, is the star attraction of the area. There are a couple of little gems hidden away though that are also worth a look.

The first of these is the Kamakura Museum of Literature. Obviously, you might think you won’t get a great deal out of such a museum if you don’t read Japanese – or even if you don’t read at all – and that might very well be true; it is, however, situated in a gorgeous old villa that overlooks the ocean, tucked away in a sea of green down some back streets. The whole atmosphere of the area is distilled chill, no reading required. I mean, just look at the road to the entrance:

I am very fond of museums of all kinds. There’s something about the neatly labelled displays, the diagrams, the dioramas – the dust – that just dings my doorbell. I always feel excited and enthused coming out of a museum, all pumped up to learn more about whatever subject I’ve just had crammed into my head through a wander down echoey hallways filled with meticulously researched items behind glass cases, mounted in wall cabinets or otherwise carefully shown to the public, always just tantalizingly out of reach.

So I quite enjoyed my time wandering this old place, learning about a whole bunch of Japanese authors I’d never even heard of – Kamakura was quite the place for men and women of letters throughout the centuries.

Yukio Mishima even used this house as a setting in one of his novels.

The other quirky little tourist attraction in Kamakura is Tankoro, an old Enoden streetcar from the 1930’s, who lives in a little park just the other side of the beach, down towards Kamakura direction. (Next to the big ramen shop that used to be a convenience store and now … isn’t, for some inexplicable reason.)

I feel like this is not the healthiest place for an old metal vehicle to reside, what with the salty sea air and all that, but he seems happy enough.