Yuru Camp appears multiple times in the Anime 88 Pilgrimage (which I introduced at the start of the 2019 blog). Unfortunately, only one of those has a stamp which goes with it – the one in Hamamatsu, a city in Shizuoka Prefecture. It’s where Nadeshiko grew up prior to the series starting, and it never actually appears in the series except for a short arc when Nadeshiko goes to visit her grandmother for new years’. I mean, I guess it’s more easily accessible by train than Minobu – the shinkansen stops there, after all – but it seems an odd place narrative-wise to host the “main” location, as it were.
Today dawned rainy as forecast. I could just make out the top of Mount Minobu from my hotel after I got up, but it soon faded from view – seeing Fuji-san from there today would have been impossible. It wasn’t raining too hard, fortunately, so I decided to press on with my original plans for today. But first, breakfast. Similar sort of food as yesterday, but somehow I only rated half a mandarin. The bottom half, which was a shade tricky to eat. There were more people in the breakfast room too.
Headed back to my room to get ready, and somehow lost track of time, because I wound up in a mad scramble to get going in time for the train. Hustled into the train station, discovered the ticket machines have a slot for an IC card, but it didn’t work, so I hastily shoved cash in instead, grabbed my ticket and raced onto the train that was sitting at the platform. At which point, one of the people who’d gotten off that train kind of gestured at me like “is that the train you meant to catch?” I’d glanced at the signboard on boarding, but hadn’t really read it – turns out it was going the wrong way. I probably caught people’s attention because I was hustling with much haste onto a train that wouldn’t be departing for another six minutes – though the train I actually wanted arrived at the station second, it’d be leaving first. Because the Minobu line is single-tracked much of the way, this train was waiting for my train to arrive before it could depart. My train would be leaving from platform two, as the station attendant informed me, which felt a bit counter-intuitive to me – Japan drives on the left, platform one is the one serving the left-hand tracks. (Also, my hotel from the train.)
Made it to the right platform in time, and I was off. I hopped off three stations later, at Kai-Tokiwa Station. In Yuru Camp, this is the station that’s closest to the school the characters attend – in-universe, it’s Motosu High School, but in the real world it’s Shimobe Elementary School and Middle School. Just like in the manga, there’s sakura trees all down the riverbank, and in the town I discovered there’s signposts about every twenty metres saying “this way to Kai-Tokiwa Station, this way to Motosu High School” with a still frame from the anime featuring that location.
Reaching the school involves going uphill (that seems to be the theme of this trip, a bit) – it even seems to be the highest building in town. I honestly would have thought they’d want to avoid drawing crowds of fans to an actual school by not plastering Yuru Camp all over the place, but I guess they don’t agree. I wouldn’t mind visiting a real working school in Japan sometime, for the ambiance, but I can see how that just might be a tad creepy. It’s school holidays starting this week, actually. (Also, various secondary sources seem to say this school has closed, but I’m yet to find any primary sources confirming it.) Anyway, the school’s currently got a row of cardboard standees of the characters standing in the main lobby, and according to Google they’ve had open days here with Yuru Camp themed events. (Actually, the school in the manga and anime doesn’t seem to quite match the layout of the real school, but they used it as a filming location for the drama version, so yeah.)
After seeing the school, my next stop in the area is the building that serves as the Shima family home. It’s actually visible from the school (and vice versa), though getting there involved getting down off the hill I was on and walking down the main road that passes the town. Kinda wonder what it’d be like to sit in your classroom at school and be able to see your own house out the window all day. I believe the real building is a former restaurant, but I’ve only got one source to back that up. It used to be marked on Google Maps as “House of Shima”, but the marker was removed. (Again, the house in the anime isn’t quite identical, most notably the entrance door is on the front in the anime and on the side in real life, but this was also a filming location in the drama version.)
From there, my next stop was the next station back down the train line. Back when I was working out the schedule for this day, I figured I’d just walk there – about a half-hour walk – picturing lovely sunshine all the while. The trains are so infrequent that it’d just be a hassle trying to synch up. Come the real thing, though, and the real rain, I thought it’d be better to take the train after all, and checked Google for the next one: five minutes away. Nice. Checked how far I was from the station: seven minutes’ walk. Not so nice.
So I walked to the next station after all. It wasn’t raining too hard, aside from one section where it suddenly decided to pick up and I took shelter at a petrol station, but I confess that a half-hour walk in any rain isn’t exactly my cup of tea. On the plus side, though, the rain and low-hanging clouds were creating a right proper ethereal mood. Just right proper damp. (I was mildly amused to see a Suzuki car dealership over the road from the service station with a bunch of Yuru Camp imagery in their window, with one of Rin riding her scooter featuring prominently… because Rin’s scooter is a Yamaha.)
The next station is the town of Shimobe Onsen. This place actually hasn’t been visited yet in Yuru Camp (aside from a short segment in the Heya Camp (= “Room Camp”) side series), but I saw it on Google maps and it looked nice. Strongly considered staying here during the planning stages – it’s an onsen town, after all – but the main town itself isn’t all that close to the station, and the accommodation prices aren’t all that close to my budget, and Minobu Inn just wound up being the better option for several reasons.
So, I decided to visit a foot bath over the river – the “Golden Foot Bath”, because apparently there used to be a gold mine in the area. It’s the one part of town that appears in Heya Camp. Not bad, though it needed something to agitate the waters with, because it was noticeably colder at the bottom than at the top. Having clean forgotten to bring my towel, I had to wait a bit for my feet to air-dry when I was done.
Then I went to have a look at the town, but I’d barely gotten halfway when I had to turn back to the station to catch the bus for my next destination, Akasawa (and it’d be a two-hour wait if I missed it). Though I admit it was a tough decision – I definitely wanted to visit Akasawa more than I wanted to see Shimobe Onsen, but getting to Akasawa from the bus stop also involved a half-hour walk (and then back again afterwards), and so it became a question of whether I wanted to see Akasawa more than I wanted to not walk for an hour in the rain. Eventually, Akasawa won out.
But first, the getting there. After discovering yesterday that I can use IC cards on the buses here, I made a point of bringing my IC card… and it turns out they can’t be used on this route, haha. In any case, after about a half-hour bus ride, I was dropped off in the Hayakawa Valley. And I started walking to Akasawa… uphill. Naturally. It was a very nice walk, mind, despite the rain. Went to step over what I took to be a piece of detritus en route, and discovered it was a live frog sitting on the road. Or maybe a toad.
Akasawa-juku used to be a post town on the pilgrim route from Mount Minobu to Mount Shichimen nearby, and in its heyday there were nine inns and forty houses here. By 1990, there were six, by 2000, three. Today, only one inn remains. It has been designated an “Important Cultural Buildings Preservation District”, and restoration efforts are ongoing. And in Yuru Camp, Rin visits a tea house here in one of the old houses – and as with all Yuru Camp locations, the tea house is real, with the name of Shimizu-ya. It was such a nice-looking place that I just had to visit. (Rin visited here the same day that Nadeshiko visited Fujinomiya. Fun fact.)
So visit I did. Like Rin, I ordered mame-mochi (rice cakes with beans mixed in), though I also decided to give amazake another try (it’s a drink of partially fermented rice which I first had back in 2017) – I liked it better than the last cup I had, but I’m still not entirely sure it’s my thing. I sat upstairs in the tatami-mat room like Rin too, and even sat at the same table (admittedly I would have preferred the other table, as it’s closer to the view, but someone else was sitting there, though I stole his table when he left).
The tables are kotatsu – low tables with a heating element underneath the tabletop, and a blanket hanging around the sides, so you get under the blanket and it warms you up. I’ve seen kotatsu in anime plenty of times, but this was my first one actually trying one. When I stayed in Yunomine Onsen back in 2017 I almost based my choice of which ryokan to stay in purely on which ones mentioned a kotatsu in advertising, but I did not in the end. Once I was in this one, it was so very toasty-warm. And like Rin, I found it near-impossible to leave. The view was quite spectacular too – with the low-hanging clouds, it looked almost like an ink painting.
As other Yuru Camp locations, this place had posters up, and also some copies of the volume the place appears in, with a bookmark in the relevant page. So I photographed some panels for comparison shots. There’s also a tourism map of other locations in the area that characters visit, and it looks like there’s a campaign running until the end of this month where you can buy a coaster with a still from the anime from each one. I didn’t buy one, though.
With the buses two hours apart and the walk half an hour each way, that gave me an hour to have a good laze around under the kotatsu, so I did, but all too soon, my time was up. I would have liked more time to explore the town, but not two whole hours more, and also that wasn’t hugely appetising in the rain. I though I’d left Shimizu-ya with ten minutes of breathing room, but somehow I managed to dawdle on the way out, so I actually had zero minutes of breathing room – and lemme tell you, power-walking for a solid half hour downhill in the rain was not how I saw my afternoon going when I got up.
I considered taking the bus back to Shimobe Onsen and actually visiting the town this time, but I was reaching the limit of how much rain I was willing to put up with. And so were my shoes. So although it was just half-past two, I decided to call it a day. So I stayed on the bus until it reached its terminus, which (conveniently for me) was Minobu Station. (Just occurred to me now that I’d originally planned to get off at a Michi-no-Eki en route. When did that get removed from my list of possible options? Though, checking Google Maps, that would have entailed doing another half-hour walk in the rain to get back to a train station afterwards…)
(On a side note, I discovered recently that the location which holds the Guinness World Record for the oldest business still in operation today is in this area. It’s the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan ryokan, which opened in 705AD (albeit as just an onsen, not a ryokan, which came along much later). And actually, I could reach it with the same bus I took to Akasawa, by staying on until much nearer its final stop, another half-hour later. It even put in a background cameo in one panel of Yuru Camp when Rin passes by on her scooter, but she doesn’t stop there. The ryokan also has its own shuttle bus, which I saw at Minobu Station yesterday. I seriously considered visiting it today as an alternate wet-weather plan, except that so near as I can tell, there’s no option for visiting the ryokan’s onsen as a day trip; you have to stay there. And it ain’t cheap.)
Back at my hotel, I had a break, focused on drying out, and did some work on my blog. Since dinner options here consist of either eating at the Chinese restaurant where I ate yesterday or going to an izakaya, I decided instead I’d eat the instant ramen I bought at a convenience store in Tokyo as insurance against the possibility that I’d find myself without dinner on at least one night while here. It’s won ton ramen. Called “A Cup of Clouds”. (Also, I’m sure I’d researched the location of another place I could eat for this night, but I cannot remember where it is. Probably should have written it down.)
Early night for a change.
Today’s photo count: three hundred and eighty-one.
Today’s step count: 15,736 steps, for 11 km exactly. 80 flights of stairs, but I reckon most of that is hill.
J³: The Next Generation 
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