52 Fujis #47 – Shin-Fujiwara

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Way up in the hills of Tochigi, you can find Shin-Fujiwara, which isn’t as new as the name would have you believe. It opened in 1919 as Fujiwara station, and then had the ‘Shin’ / ‘new’ prefix added in 1922. ‘Shin’ more often than not means it’s another station built in the same town to service a different area, but not here.

(I think I read somewhere that it was because it was literally new but I can’t track down where exactly this notion comes from, so you know, anecdotal, grains of salt etc.)

Shin-Fujiwara is on the Tobu line, so some of their express trains make it all the way up here. Others stop just down the line at Kinugawa-onsen, a resort town that time and Tokyo tourists have seemingly forgotten. Other expresses don’t even make it that far. Tobu trains are a fickle bunch, not unlike those tourists.

There certainly weren’t a whole lot of them around here in January; yet I don’t think the time of the year was the issue. Resorts go in and out of fashion unless there’s something really special about them.

Some of those aforementioned fickle Tobu trains hark back to more prosperous times. New and shiny back in the nineties, they now have a shabby, lived-in feel. Much like Kinugawa itself.

It was once a pretty popular destination for a hot spring getaway. Nowadays, rundown, dilapidated, seen-better-days hotels tower over the riverside, straining to give their guests the best view. There are more than a few that have closed up shop for good: one particular forlorn example stands right on the main road, across from the rail tracks, grey & ghostly & sad, forever watching the trains taking people out of town, away from its empty rooms and blank windows.

There was a sense that a lot of stories were crouching in corners, hiding in scuff marks, & nestled in shadows, just waiting to be discovered. It turns out that there were some discoveries to be made, in the form of some local demons who made an appearance, no doubt having heard from their brethren all the way up in Iwate that I would be in town.

After arriving late on Saturday night after work, I planned to get up early on Sunday & explore Shin-Fujiwara. As usual, it didn’t look like there was much to see (except for some demons) but maybe, I thought, there’d be some surprises near Shin-Fujiwara station. I’d walk down to the river, see if there were any interesting trails.

If not, I was thinking of just walking back through the hills to Kinugawa-onsen: there weren’t a whole lot of trains back, despite this Fuji being the terminus for two whole trainlines, and I didn’t think there’d be enough to do there for a couple of hours.

As I was looking at timetables in Kinugawa-onsen, a surprise did turn up. In came the Taiju in clouds of steam & big gobs of sooty smoke, before I’d even made it to Shin-Fujiwara.

It would be hard for Shin-Fujiwara to top that, and as I’m sure you could imagine, it didn’t really: a sleepy temple, another appearance by Nichiren himself (he likes to follow me about the country too) & that was about it.

The train schedule being what it was, I decided it would be fun to visit Nikko for the first time in years. It was only an hour or so away, and I headed on down that direction, as the wintry sunshine surrendered to gray clouds.

Looking back, I see now that I’m just one of those fickle tourists, distracted by baubles and trinkets, leaving the plainer charms of the countryside behind for the extravagant opulence of Toshugu, the shrine in Nikko where Tokugawa Ieyasu, the unifier of Japan, was laid to rest.

I hope Kinugawa-onsen forgives me & I hope it’s doing okay.

(Honestly, as I write this in September 2020, I wonder how exactly the town has fared this year and I feel a little sad for the place. It was somewhere I could imagine going back to one day. The whole town felt like a commercial for a slower pace of life, and managed to do so without seeming hopelessly boring. While I suspect it actually is, I don’t care: sometimes a little boredom can go a long way to soothing frazzled wits.)