Bright Lights, Big city.

Day 13 Sunday 22nd August 2010

Downtown Kameoka

The apartment where we are staying is in the middle of town. It’s a town of about 100,000 people and is really now a suburb of Kyoto. In some ways it reminds me of some of the towns that you find just off the highways in America. The main drag runs parallel with the motorway and the railway. It’s got the usual junk food outlets, supermarkets, car dealers, gas stations and, this being Japan, Pachinko parlours. I kind of like it though. I’m a car guy. I like to drive everywhere and Kameoka supports this habit. I hate public transport though I have to admit that the trains here are as good as it is possible to get. So we went for a bit of a drive around town to take in the sights. First up was the Kameoka Galleria. This is a big impressive looking glass and concrete monolith right on the main road. I had been past it a couple of times and wondered what went on there so we headed inside for a look. I am still wondering what goes on there. It’s a superbly built engineering marvel that must have cost millions and seems to be totally pointless. There’s a restaurant and an ice cream shop and the chamber of commerce has an office there. There also appeared to be some kind of conference room/theatre and a small reference library. This huge building looks to me to be a spending public money exercise, a solution to a problem that didn’t exist. As with most white elephants it was rather sad to see such a magnificent building being so underused. 

Mighty Hozu River

Next was the Hozu river which runs along the Northern edge of the town. According to the tourist blurb it’s a stunningly beautiful bit of scenery and you can take a boat trip along it to appreciate it. We missed the departure time so I decided to drive along the banks for a bit to have a look. According to my nav system the road follows the river for quite a distance. As we progressed along the road it got narrower and the vegetation alongside got thicker. Soon we were on gravel and then dirt. This was looking more like a walking track. Then we passed a big sign with red Kanji letters on it. Shizuka started muttering something about turning around but I’m not one to let a funny sign in some unreadable language get in the way of an adventure. The bush got thicker and the track rougher. Shizuka says that this can’t be a public road. I say we’ve got 4wd and we don’t need roads! We pass a hiker with a backpack who looks a bit surprised to see us driving along here. There there’s another sign with more red Kanji and exclamation marks. Shizuka says it’s a warning sign…its dangerous here. I say getting out of bed can be dangerous….we’re exploring here. Another 200 metres and here’s another sign. This one’s got more illegible scribbles on it. Shizuka translates it as “falling rocks and landslides…extremely dangerous…no vehicles….high risk”. By now she’s pretty adamant that we should turn around and I reluctantly agree. Its thick jungle here and I can’t even see this river. So we head back into town and visit the entertainment centre. This consists of a huge Pachinko hall and an internet café with a huge manga library.  Here are my thoughts on manga and anime. People who read this crap seriously need to grow up. Comics and cartoons are for children. It amazes me how the trains and magazine stores here are full of grown men reading this childish nonsense. Even more amazing are the foreigners who should know better. How people can devote whole blogs to this rubbish is beyond my comprehension. 

And that’s about it for Kameoka city.  One gets the feeling that the mayor and the city government realise the need to draw people to the city. They have set up all the sister city associations they can and their website has an English version. It's just that they don't have much to work with.  In the city hall there's an oil painting on the wall. It's of a stack of shipping containers with a wire fence around them. Whoever painted this could have chosen the stunning mountain scenery around here as his subject. Even some rice paddies would have been more appealing. But no.... he chose to paint a container storage yard. And then the city government chose to hang it on a wall by the entrance to the city hall.  Indicitive of the lack of creative thinking that Japan is noted for. No tourist or cultural mecca for sure but I sort of like Kameoka because its small enough to get around easily but big enough to have everything you might need.