Random Fukuoka Street Scenes

The new year is upon us. 2011 was a pretty busy year for us. We got a dog. Umh....yeah that alone pretty much explains why we were so busy. Well, I`ve also been much busier with my thesis than I was in 2010 and Ena has been extremely busy with work too, so those also contributed.

Anyway, this is a bit of a melancholy new year for me as in all likelihood it will be our last in Fukuoka. I`ll be graduating in 2012 and in all likelihood wherever I end up working after that will not be here.

Its been three years since we arrived and the place has really grown on me. If you ever get the chance to live somewhere in Japan, make it Fukuoka if you can.

Far and away the thing I will miss most is simply riding my bike around the city and the countryside around it. I haven`t done as much of that this year as in the past (as I said, we got a dog), but just riding around on a bicycle surrounded by interesting things everywhere you go is an experience like no other.

I made a trip into town the other day and brought my camera along with me to photograph some of the random scenery that I pass. On the way in, the Gofukumachi area near the Shofukuji temple has some interesting old shops on very quiet streets:
This alley in Tenjin, which is actually quite close to where Ena works, has always interested me just due to the sheer volume of air conditioners that have been crammed onto the side of that one building:
The details are often what make things interesting:On the way back it is dark. The city looks quite fun after the sun has gone down, especially in Nakasu where the nightlife is kind of bustling:
Whenever possible I like to ride through Nakasu at night, but in all our time here I`ve never actually had a night on the town there. Not surprising I guess given my age and marital status.

This alley here is near Canal City. It is devoid of any interesting architecture so its the type of place nobody ever notices. Whenever I ride by it though I just have to look at it. Somehow the combination of everything in it I find very visually appealing. The distance between the buildings, the amount of dirt on them, the mess of signs and lights - it is like they are all perfectly calculated to look right. Everything is well balanced. Most such alleys don`t get it right. There is always something amiss - too much space between the buildings, not enough lights, a building that has been torn down to make a parking lot - something is always out of place and it ruins the image. This one somehow got everything right though.
This here is a really small shrine on a street in Hakozaki. I love riding past it at night because the neon sign next to it, which is an ad for a shop up the block, illuminates its white roof in a pretty way. Its another one of those pleasant accidents in the placing of objects that gives the city its charm.
This is the Nishitetsu Kaizuka Station. Its an ugly station and the only reason I photographed it is for my own memory. Ena returns home from work there everyday and when I go to meet her I usually wait in the spot from which this photo was taken. Its just another one of those little things that I`m going to miss.

Fukuoka Garden Tour Part 2

Ena and I got to complete our Fukuoka garden tour by visiting the Japanese garden at Ohori Koen which had been closed on our last visit.

Its a really nice garden, probably the biggest in Fukuoka (though small by "big" garden standards). They didn't display much imagination in naming the garden, which is literally called "Japanese garden." Even in Japanese that is what it is called (日本庭園）.

Other than that though, its great. Admission is only 240 yen. When we paid the person at the gate offered us a spray from two aerosol cans of bug repellent, which we declined much to our later regret. When you enter you are greeted with some nice trees and streams running along a path:
The path leads to the main feature of the garden, its large pond:
The path takes you around it:
You can go up a little hill covered in Momiji trees and get an excellent view of the pond from beneath their canopy:
There are several artificial waterfalls and streams:
After circumnavigating the pond we took a seat on some nice little stools overlooking it. This was where the bug repellent would have come in useful, tons of mosquitoes swarmed us and we had to move on after a couple minutes:
After that we went to the other part of the garden, which makes good use of the borrowed scenery of Ohori Koen's lake:
They've got a raked sand garden here:
And a series of winding stone pathways leading through the trees and streams:
They've also got a teahouse, but they don't seem to offer any tea service like the other gardens we've been to so we couldn't go in:
After the garden we got back on our bikes and did a little riding around Ohori Koen. Ohori Koen has my favorite short bike ride in Fukuoka. There are three islands in the lake, which are all connected by cute little bridges, allowing you to cross the lake over them. Its nice for a walk or bike ride. We stopped to sit and relax on one of the islands for a little while:
We had a nice little view, and no mosquitoes:
I think I would rate Ohori Koen's Japanese garden as the second best in the city. Yusentei just edges it out because of its really fantastic tea house and more authentic, historic feel (Ohori Koen's garden just dates to 1984). Its a great garden though, well worth a visit.

Related Posts:
- Fukuoka Garden Tour (part 1)

Sex and the City (of Fukuoka)

When I was getting my visa renewed a few days ago I also got my work permit renewed. This allows me to work part time, which isn't normally permitted on a student visa. I mainly need it for the editing and research jobs I do for some profs on occasion.

While the immigration official was explaining the limits of my work permit (can't work more than 28 hours per week, etc) he made a point of telling me I was not permitted to do any "fuzoku" work. This made me laugh out loud as "fuzoku" jobs are basically jobs in the sex industry. In other words he was warning me against working as a male prostitute.
Above: exactly the type of thing immigration officials are striving to keep out of Fukuoka.

Decidedly not reassured by my reaction, he drove home the point "Seriously. Don't work at Nakasu Soapland. It will be a violation of your work permit and you will risk deportation."

Looking down at my T-shirt and shorts from discount retailer Uniqlo, rubbing my 33 year old pot belly with one hand while running the other through my buzz-cut hair (1,000 yen at the mall) I thought of asking him what on earth made him think I was somehow the type of person who would be likely to find work in the sex industry. Realizing that no matter how I phrased it such a question would only lead to trouble I instead opted to meekly thank the official for his wise guidance and promise to refrain from embarking on any untoward career moves.

Afterward I kind of got to thinking with some amusement about the Nakasu district of Fukuoka. You know a neighborhood has a bad reputation if immigration officials are specifically enjoining foreign residents from working there by name as a condition of their getting a work permit.

As I've noted before Nakasu is the centre of Fukuoka's red light district. Its actually a small island separated by canals from the rest of the city (though you barely notice this when riding through). I have to cross through there on my way to and from downtown, though I've never really explored the area. Mainly this is because I'm a little scared of the place after dark - all sorts of aggressive and shady looking characters populate its sidewalks at night so I just zip on through.

Since I've been keeping this blog though I've really wanted to take a few pictures there because its the sort of thing you don't see back in Canada. As I was passing through at around 1 o'clock in the afternoon today and I thought everything was closed (and thus no aggressive/shady people around) I determined to take a quick spin through the streets of Nakasu. My trip revealed to me the folly of believing that Nakasu ever closes down.

The main street that I often cross, though almost never ride down, was in fact more or less empty:
The store fronts of hostess bars had pictures of the women who worked there and their rates. Hostess bars I should note are not a form of prostitution. They don't really have an equivalent in Canada. They are just bars where women work and their job is to pour drinks and laugh and listen to the stories of salarymen who want to feel like important guys:
I also stumbled across one of the weirder fads in Japan these days, maid cafes. To the best of my knowledge these are just normal cafes except the waitresses are dressed up as maids. The mere fact that places such as these exist just perplexes me to no end.
Men also work in Nakasu at places geared towards a female clientele:
If it hadn't been for the helpful warning from the kind immigration official, my face might have ended up on this billboard. I would probably have adopted the facial expression of the guy second from the left.

Up until this point I had just been riding along the main street, which was more or less empty in the middle of the afternoon. Emboldened by this I resolved to do a little cycling off the beaten track and into some of the interesting looking side streets. This turned out to be something of a mistake.

It turns out that the main street of Nakasu is just where the more pedestrian businesses are mostly located. The seedy, blatantly obvious brothels are located on the side streets. Or at least on the side street that I happened to ride down.

While riding the empty main street nobody had bothered me at all. The side street looked pretty quiet at first, but the very second my front tire crossed into it I was swarmed by the Japanese equivalent of pimps on all sides trying to get me into their establishments.

"Come and look at the pictures of my girls" said a middle-aged woman, running backwards in front of me "they are so beautiful."

"Come here, you'll have such a good time with my women" said an older man ambling over to me on the other side who could best be described as a Japanese version of Jack from "Father Ted":
It was all too much for an innocent boy from rural Ontario like me to take. "abdabadabeduh" I stammered, my face turning bright red, "heh-heh, no thank you.....heh".

I pedaled past the woman, desperate to find an exit to the bloody street. More pimps bellowed at me to come into their establishment. "No thank you" I said, smiling while desperately hoping not to run into anyone I knew, "I promised immigration I wouldn't."

Finally I came to the end of the street, which was at the canal that formed one of the borders of Nakasu. I spun around and took a picture of the street which, disappointingly, looks like just any other street in photo form.
Each of those shop fronts has a kind of "pimp" (not necessarily an accurate word to describe them, but I don't know of another that accurately conveys the meaning of "someone who stands on the street and looks for clients to have some sort of sexual service performed by a third party") sitting in front who springs into action the moment a person walks past.

Yet another seedy part of Fukuoka's urban fabric laid bare. With that I headed home.

Postscript (November 4, 2010):

Since I put this post up I've noticed that my blog has rather oddly started to get a lot more traffic than it used to. This got me curious.

Google blogger has a neat function that allows the person running the blog to know what search terms people entered into google in order to reach the blog. So for example if you reached my blog because you did a google search for "Fukuoka sightseeing" I would know that fact thanks to blogger.

Prior to putting up this post, I used to get a lot of visits by people looking for relatively innocent information about things like "Kyushu University information" or "Fukuoka travel" or something. After putting up this post, which regrettably has the word "sex" in the title, I started getting visitors of a different kind.

I won't put up any of the more imaginative search terms here (this is a family friendly blog after all) but suffice it to say that judging from some of them my blog and this post in particular seem to be getting visited by a class of people that I would generally characterize as "out of town businessmen looking for information about where they can procure the services of prostitutes during their stay in Fukuoka."

Now, I'm not a particularly judgmental kind of guy, but I have to say that I do not in any way want my blog to in any way be facilitating the sex trade. Its a brutal industry that promotes either directly or indirectly all sorts of bad things against vulnerable people - probably the most notorious being human trafficking. So I've gone through and edited out all the details of my trip so as to minimize its use for that purpose.

Related Posts:

Fukuoka Night Rider

Embarrassing Google Searches and My Little Blog

Fukuoka Airport and Shime Coal Mine: An Odd Combination, But That is Where I Went Today

I had to bike out to Fukuoka Airport today to renew my visa. I don't really like heading to the airport because its a really unpleasant ride mostly through an industrial area. The only interesting thing brightening the journey is the tasteful artwork to be found in a Pachinko Parlour parking lot:
I actually like Fukuoka airport. Its close to downtown, easily accessible by subway (less than 10 minutes to the heart of the city) and....well other than that its just a normal airport. Which is fine.

Up until about a year ago the newest public works boondoggle-in-the-making was an entirely new Fukuoka airport to be built on an artificially constructed island at an estimated cost of 920 billion yen (about 9 billion US dollars). Thankfully the governor said "no", which made me quite happy. These artificial island airports are such a waste of money and resources. Where we used to live in the Kansai area what can only be called idiotic decision making (particularly by the Kobe city government) led to two of these monstrosities (KIX and Kobe) being built right next to each other even though there was already an airport (Itami) servicing the region. The struggles of these new airports have been news fodder for some time now. Both Osaka and Kobe's city governments are massively in debt and they have these airports to thank for it. Joining in on the idiotic, unnecessary airport building boom was rural Ibaraki, which just opened its own finance-destroying airport much to the amusement of the mass media in March.

Anyway, enough about that. The one thing I find amusing about Fukouka's airport actually isn't in the airport itself, its what is across the street when you leave the front door:
Welcome to Fukuoka! Land of....ugly billboards. So, you know....come to Fukuoka...if you like billboards and stuff. Cuz we got lots of them.

These things are visible from miles away at night, when we take a bus out of town on the return trip I always look for these signs because they are the only Fukuoka landmark visible from the highway (which doesn't run anywhere near them) that is instantly recognizable. If you look closely, some of these are actually built directly over people's homes.

After finishing my business at the airport I decided to head over to nearby Shime town, which is only about 20 minutes by bike away. Shime is a former coal mining town whose mines shut down a long time ago. Last December the remnants of the Shime coal mine were declared an important cultural property by the central government. This is part of a new trend to recognize and protect former industrial sites for posterity's sake, NHK even did a show about it (not just about Shime, but the mine was included in one segment). I just had to go check it out for myself.

The road from the airport to Shime, I have to say, is not an attractive one. Especially on a rainy day, this guy provided the only color:
Anyway, after a few minutes of pedaling I arrived at Shime. Finding the coal mine wasn't hard as the shaft tower looms over the entire town and is easily visible in the distance:
The Shime mine began operations in the late 19th century, though the above structure (which is really all that is left above ground) was built during the war when the mine was used to supply coal to the Japanese Navy. It is a well-documented fact that a lot of coal mines in Fukuoka employed Allied POWs during the war in some really atrocious conditions. None of the signs which gave the building's history gave any hint of whether that was the case at Shime mine as well, though the time of its construction (1943) and its use by the Navy make me suspect it may have been.

At any rate, I have to admit that the building has an odd charm about it. Something about its odd shape, it looks different from different angles:

The mine was closed in 1964 and the structure sat abandoned until recently people became interested in preserving it as a form of cultural property. As you can see the concrete is in pretty rough shape:
While I found the building itself to be fairly interesting, the overall experience of going there was a bit of a let-down. While the structure itself has been barred up since it was closed, up until some time in the recent past it had been possible to walk right up to the building. There is a landscaped path that leads right next to it. Unfortunately they recently surrounded the thing with a tall chain-link fence that prevents anyone from getting within about 50 metres of it. The fence cuts across the path that used to lead right up to it:
There wasn't anyone around and I couldn't find out why they had done this, the signs just say "Entry prohibited". There may have been some valid safety concerns involved here, but closing it off like this really takes a lot out of the experience.

Actually the surrounding area isn't particularly nice either. They've built a giant public recreation hall right next to it and a park that has a few useless structures that do nothing to protect passing bloggers from the rain as I discovered during a sudden downpour while I was there:
Fencing things off, building parks and recreation halls is OK, but.....I think what needs pointing out is that - basically - this mine shaft is an ugly, ugly piece of concrete shit. The only thing that makes it interesting is its kind of brooding, derelict-looking state that can really make people's imaginations work. If you fence it off and surround it with the same sterile old shlocky municipal park-type crap with a big ugly recreation centre and huge parking lot right next to it, then you rob it of even that. I'm certainly not saying they should have just left it to rot, but there must have been a better way to do this.

Hmmm...on second thought maybe they should have left it to rot. Beautiful neighborhoods lined with lovely old wooden machiya getting bulldozed across the country and THIS is what they decide to invest money in protecting as important cultural property? Ah, screw it, I'll never understand this country.

Anyway, with the help of a cropping function I can still capture some of its brooding dereliction:

The entrance to the mine itself is nearby, also fenced off:
The town of Shime, once you get off the awful main road, isn't too bad. They seem to have had a lot of red bricks brought in at some time as some of the side streets are full of lovely walls made of them:
The tower looms over them:
Related Posts:

- Urban Ghost Town: The Bewitching Ugliness of Chiyomachi Nichome
- Shoutengai and Kashii: The Bulldozer Comes to Higashi Ku
- Kyudai Hakozaki: The Elegant Decay of a Dying Campus

Postscript - April 8, 2011

In the first few months since I put this post up it got a little over a 100 pageviews total. Then one day last week it suddenly got almost 2,000 in a single day.

Enter the Anti-Zombie Fortress meme. Apparently somebody noticed that the Shime coal mine would make a perfect anti-zombie fortress and the whole internet took notice of this bizarre fact and everyone suddenly wanted to know everything they could about the previously-obscure Shime coal mine. This post of mine and this one at Abandoned Kansai seem to be the only English blog entries out there detailing the mine, hence the surge of traffic.

Anyway, anyone out there looking to play with the Anti-Zombie fortress thing, I hereby give you permission and encourage you to use the photos on this post for whatever creative zombie related endeavours you may have, assuming this thing hasn't completely played itself out yet, which it might well have.