[28-08-2009]
Fukui Ikkimasu!
Yep…today was the day that we made an epic 4 hour journey to Ai’s hometown of Sakai City in Fukui prefecture! I decided way before embarking on this holiday that I wanted to visit the areas where Ai, Risa and Eri grew up and preceded to make preparations before I had even booked my flight and hotel. Eri’s from Tokyo (although I don’t know what part) so I’ve obviously covered her hometown repeatedly. But I’ll be honest in saying that I would like to know exactly which part of Tokyo she’s from so I can visit specific places she may have roamed when growing up. Risa’s from Yokohama so I went there twice (three times with the upcoming Nanchatte Renai events) and got to visit the places she mentioned in the infamous Osaka Koi no Uta Music Fighter. But again, I wish I knew exactly which part she’s from as Yokohama is a vast city. Ai’s hometown on the other hand I had never been too, and if I wanted to visit it I’d have to locate the place first :S Having only Wikipedia to go by I found out that she was from Sakai City in Fukui prefecture but Sakai City is not actually a city in our sense of the word, but is a merger of four towns (Harue, Maruoka, Mikuni and Sakai). I didn’t know specifically which town she was from so originally I just planned to visit the general area and a couple of tourist attractions that are there. Luckily for us Ai was recently on a Fukui TV shows called Iiza Ee Day which helped us slightly by offering more Ai related things to do whilst we were there. I hadn’t actually watched these two shows (although I had downloaded them) but zorrander remembered that she visited a biscuit factory in one and when he researched the factory we found that it was in Maruoka. As soon as we knew that we decided that would be the first destination we’d head for.
On the evening of the 26th I spent a fair amount of time working out which trains we needed to get and how much time we would be required to make this all do-able, but for some strange reason I couldn’t find the destination we needed – Maruoka – on Hypedia *grrr* Since coming back to the UK I realised that I had been spelling it wrong which is why I couldn’t find it…FAIL! Even though we did manage to get there in the end this mistake on my part meant we ended up in the wrong place first, although for part of the sightseeing I wanted to do it was actually the right place *roll eyes* We had booked our Shinkansen tickets the day before so were ready to rock and roll with reserved seats for the journey between Shinagawa and Maibara, which was good as that was the longest part of the journey at just over 2 hours. I didn’t sleep well the night before because I was worried I hadn’t done enough planning / research to stop us getting lost, plus I was also worried about oversleeping and missing out on the whole trip. This meant I slept for the majority of the journey >_<
maibara station…
Upon reaching Maibara we started to realise that we were already heading into ‘rural’ Japan which was pretty cool, but this is where my earlier planning cock up came in to play. Because I couldn’t find Maruoka on Hypedia I went for another place I found that was in the general direction that we needed to go in. This place was called Awaraonsen. Luckily my ‘pick a place any place’ decision was on the same train line as Maruoka, but unbeknown to me two types of train run along the track – a Local and a LTD Express. In order to get from Maibara to Maruoka we should’ve changed trains in Fukui, but as I thought we’d go to Awaraonsen we could use the LTD Express to travel directly there quicker, which we did. Unfortunately the LTD express only stops at the ‘bigger’ stations and ploughs through all the smaller ones, so we passed through the stop we wanted without even knowing it lol.
boars made out of bowls and stuff at awaraonsen station
Upon reaching Awaraonsen we left the station and started to look around for some kind of map. The area was more built up then we expected and luckily had a tourist information centre near the exit of the station. After looking over a map of Fukui for 5 minutes and comparing the Kanji place names I wrote down on my iPhone, the Japanese woman behind the desk decided to give us an English guide as we were leaving! Like gah dammit woman, you could see we were struggling yet you didn’t get out from behind your desk to help us out!!! BITCH! Once we were back outside I looked through the guide and confirmed that we were in the wrong place so we headed back in to the station. Once in there I decided to ask the very nice station attendant (who was female), where Maruoka was on the map and how we’d get there. Unfortunately I’m a little bit shy with my limited Japanese and because she was quite nice I kinda choked on my words lol. It took me two attempts to get “Maruoka wa doko desu ka” out >_< Eventually she showed me how to get where we wanted and even told me what time the train was coming as we needed to catch the ‘Local’. We had to wait 30 minutes for the next train so I studied the guide on the platform only to find that one of the tourist spots I wanted to visit was accessed from Awaraonsen (by bus tour). Tojinbo (Suicide Cliffs) is somewhere I really wanted to see as it’s kinda strange to visit cliff areas in Japan. Everyone goes to Tokyo which has a harbour / bay area and Yokohama has the same so cliffs would be really exciting for me (especially as I come from an area famed for it’s coastline), plus this was a spot where many Japanese people take their lives. zorrander wasn’t interested in the Suicide Cliffs and just wanted to get to Maruoka so I had to forget about that. Next time I come to Japan for an extended period of time I will try to go there.
maruoka station
Maruoka was very different to Awaraonsen in the fact that it was manly large, open spaces of country side with small clumps of houses stationed here and there. The air was clear and the only sound to be heard was that of birds and the occasional car. It was heaven after all the time we had spent in busy Tokyo and Yokohama ♥ Our aim in Maruoka was to visit the Satsukigase shop which Ai visited in Fukui Iiza Ee Day and to buy some of the Ai biscuits that she talked about on the show. zorrander had drawn a rough map but as there really wasn’t any landmarks to go by I knew we had a bit of a job on our hands. Luckily I remembered that it was south west of the station, and the fact that the station lies north-south meant I could get us going in the general direction. We walked in the right direction for about 10 minutes without seeing another person except for them passing by in their cars, so when we were walking past some houses zorrander stopped to ask a guy (the first guy we saw there) for directions to the shop. As anything other than the basic of basics Japanese is beyond me I let zorrander deal with this, although he only managed to pick up slightly more than me. Going by his hand signals alone (in my case) we started off again on our trek to get some biscuits. Roughly another 15 minutes after walking along the road we heard a beep and the old guy that we asked for directions pulled up in his pick up truck and told us he’d give us a lift. I was pretty bowled over by his generosity, especially as we were both foreigners with hardly any Japanese speaking ability between us. Either way I was glad of the lift because it would’ve taken us about 40 minutes to walk there ourselves >_<
satsukigase sign outside the shop / factory
Once he dropped us off at the shop we made our way in to buy what we were after – 1 packet of these crunchy peanut biscuits that she helped make on the Iiza Ee Day show and 2 boxes of the Ai Evangelion biscuits. Want an opinion on them? Crunchy Peanut biscuits are vile, so vile in fact that I sent the rest of them out with some presents I picked up (sorry guys…) and as for the Ai Evangelion biscuits…they were bland! Thinking back I expect it was really quite strange for the people working in the shop. Just from the general feel of the area I doubt they see many foreigners around those parts and they had two of them in their shop in one day! Actually…we were probably their only customers of the day lol (yes it was that quite there)
We decided to walk a different way back to the train station (or the general direction of the train station) and the way we chose was incredibly windy. I’m not particularly worried when it comes to my looks but one thing that I can’t stand is my hair being blown around everywhere, so I remedied it by wearing a beanie……in the sweltering heat! Saved me from looking like I got dragged through a hedge backwards but boy was I sweating ^^;
When we made it back to the station I realised that we had lots more time left in Maruoka so we set out on two missions. 1 – To find Maruoka Castle and 2 – To find some food! Once again I knew the general direction of the castle as it was marked on the guide we got from Awaraonsen, so this meant it couldn’t be too hard to find right? Right?…WRONG! We walked, and walked…and walked for miles and we couldn’t see any sign of a freaking castle. None whatsoever <_< Apart from the mountains that were in the distance Sakai City is 100% flat so using my theory that a ‘castle is a form of protection and thus should be sited high up so they have a perfect view of everything’ we looked around for an elevated building. There weren’t any… We carried on walking and walking until we came to a very small industrial estate and zorrander and I decided that we would walk just a little bit further through the buildings to see what was on the other side. Lo and behold…there was the bastard castle!
see the castle? it’s there I swear!
*if you click on the photo and view the original size you’ll find there’s a rotating Mc Donalds sign very near the castle*
To hell was I going to walk all that way to see a castle that – from this distance – didn’t look as impressive as the ones I’ve visited before (Himeji and Nagoya), so we decided to cut our losses and make our way back to the train station. On the way back we looked around for some place to eat at but there was nowhere. Near the train station there were two small shops but they mainly sold alcohol and stuff that was more than likely not what it looks like and as I wasn’t going to try my luck we decided to put up with empty stomachs until we reached our next destination – Fukui. Just to help you get a perspective of what this place was like (if the photos don’t help enough), we spent a fair few hours there and we walked a large area around the station. In the time we were there we probably saw a maximum of 5 people in total, plus a playground full of kids. That was it! If it wasn’t for the fact that we saw a few cars every now and again I would’ve thought we had stumbled upon on a land version of the Mary Celeste! It was really nice though and it’s a part of Japan I would love to visit again, but only for a day as it’d get very boring very quickly.
bye bye maruoka
hello fukui city
Fukui station’s nice… That’s about the only good thing I can say about the place. Harsh? Maybe, but this place felt like something and nothing. The station has been rebuilt recently so looks aesthetically pleasing from the outside, but the rest of the city is tatty and old looking. All the shops seemed like they were for people of a ‘mature’ age and nothing interested me in the slightest. Ai also visited Fukui City on the Iiza Ee Day show and whilst she was there they visited a galleria that she used to spend her pocket money in. I saw what it looked like in the video but neither of us had any idea where it was so we just wandered nomadically. We were actually primarily looking for something to eat but figured that if we found this place it’d be like a Brucey Bonus. I was leading us round some roads making sure I kept a track of where the station was then all of a sudden I spotted the galleria.
As we walked through the galleria I was looking at all the shops to try and figure out where Ai would’ve spent her money as a kid. My conclusion is that the stores have more than likely changed since she was a young whipper snapper as the place was full of boutiques only your granny would find interesting. What a let down. Upon exiting the other side we made our way back around the outside of the building and went to eat in Mc Donalds. I decided I’d had my fill of Fukui and we made our way back to the station to catch an earlier train to Tokyo. Sakai City / Maruoka was so different that it was nice to see but Fukui City was utter pants. Sorry Ai-chan…
On the Shinkansen from Maibara to Tokyo we sat next to a middle aged lady and I had a short chat with her. She knew we were English as she offered us the seats next to her on the train (it was packed) but the woman managed to dupe me to start off with. zorrander had put his headphones in and was listening to music so I was quite bored and she said something to me in Japanese. At this I started to say “gomen nasai, nihon-go ga wakarimasen” and she said in perfect English “Where are you from?” COW! Anyway, she thought it was kinda funny that we had travelled all the way from Tokyo to visit Fukui and just asked me one simple question…”why?” I couldn’t tell her that one of my favourite idols was born and grew up there for fear of having to explain myself, so instead I just settled on telling her some random crap. After the little conversation I fell asleep again for the majority of the trip ^^
Once back in Tokyo gordokaba and I met up in Kanda to have dinner so after looking around most of the restaurants we settled on Yakitori. I’m hoping I can find this place again because the food was absolutely amazing and boy did we eat a lot of it. In true lolli and gordokaba style we drank plenty of alcohol and ended up spending just over 12,000 yen – £65 at the time – on chicken and beer (some cabbage and rice too). I didn’t think this was bad but gordokaba was like WTF?! O_O when we had to pay lol. We said our goodbyes and I made my uneventful but drunken way back to the hotel to find that I was locked out of the room and zorrander was asleep >< After banging on the door periodically for 10 minutes I decided to give up and sleep in the corridor, but luckily zorrander opened the door just as I was getting comfy. I thought I’d sleep well that night what with all the fresh air and Japanese beer but no…the impending events of the next – and final – day were playing on my mind. I was already excited for what was to come…
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