52 Fujis #3 – Fujine (Shizuoka)

Don’t know what a 52 Fuji is? Check out this page.

Flush with the joy of starting a new project, our third Fuji was also visited in May, 2006. For most of the two weeks between the first two Fujis and this one, it had rained constantly. It had dried up at long last, so I thought I’d get back on track with another Fuji.

The dull weather didn’t do many favours for poor old Fujine. My memories of the train to work passing through here are of factories. Fujine always looked a bit like a building site, an unfinished project that people would occasionally remember, come back to, tinker with and poke at, before going home and forgetting all about it again. (Oddly prophetic that.)

Fujine is the last stop on the Minobu line that’s still in Fuji city – 7km from the city centre, and 3km from Fujinomiya; there is very little else of note to be said about it.

Fujine was, in 2006, a weird little place. Once off the train and into the actual physical space of the place, it was clear that the building site analogy wasn’t entirely inaccurate. The place felt like it had been designed by a committee hell-bent on cheering the place up.

So it was that a train shaped public toilet squatted in a park near the station, a mural depicting herds of animals ran amok on the wall encircling the bike sheds, and there was another mural with an aquarium theme which covered the underpass.

A public loo, made out of concrete and shaped like a train.

Nice to see someone having a go at prettying the place up a bit, but the fact of the matter is that Fujine is a maintenance storage depot for JR – there were rail laying trains, inspection trains and plenty of track lying around. It’s not easy for a small station in an industrial part of town to transcend the kind of aesthetics that such a job requires.