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.

Putting Stickers on Bikes and the Chiba Lotte Marine's Bus

The rainy season has finally finished and we had our first weekend with some sunny weather so the two of us headed downtown yesterday sans dog.
Ena suggested inaugurating my new bike with some stickers. So we went to the loft and I chose a sheet of 1970s style Marvel Super Hero faces:
And Ena got some penguins for hers:
I put Iron Man on mine:
and Ena put the penguins on hers:
I got a whole bunch of points on my card at Bic Camera when I bought my new bike, so we stopped there so I could splurge on some more bike swag:
My bike now has its own computer with speedometer, odometer, clock, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

We went for a pretty nice, though hot, bike ride out to Marinoa and back. On the return trip we rode past the Fukuoka Dome, where a game had just ended. The visiting team (Chiba Lotte Marines) were just leaving the stadium via their team bus as we rode by.
We noticed the crowd of fans swarming around and joined them for a few minutes:
Watching people slowly get on a bus one by one isn't a particularly entertaining activity so we only hung around for a couple of minutes.

We stopped for dinner on the way back at an outdoor patio along the river in Nakasu.
Its the perfect place to rest after a long hot summer's day:

Got M'self a New Bicycle Today.

If seven time Tour de France champion and suspected dope fiend Lance Armstrong were to come up to me one day and ask:

"Sean, tell me about your new bike. Describe it for me in three words or less."

I would say to him:

"Well, Lance, thanks for asking. The three words that would best describe it are: very, very yellow.''

And that would probably be the end of the conversation.
I didn't intend to buy a new bicycle when I woke this morning. I was supposed to spend this sunny day entirely in my study room looking at a computer screen.

Thankfully on my way in my old bicycle suddenly broke down. A spoke on the back wheel snapped, making a huge bang. The wheel started to wobble after that and the thing became un-rideable. This is the third time that bike has suffered a broken spoke for no apparent reason.

I took it to the nearest repair shop and they said it'll take them 2-3 weeks to fix it, which is what it usually takes them.

After leaving it there and pondering 2-3 weeks without wheels for a second, I decided it was time to get a new bike.

I've noticed that in Higashi Ku everyone rides really boring bikes. Functional and colorless. We are not a stylish people, us Higashi Ku-ians.

Go downtown though and it is wall to wall hep cats riding much cooler looking bikes. Sleek, colorful and smoove. I've always wanted one of them stylish bikes the city folk downtown ride. So I decided to get on the train and go around to some of the hep cat bike shops in Tenjin to see what they had.

I went to a few. I eventually decided on this one. Its just so...very very yellow. The grips on the handlebars are very very yellow:
The seat is very very yellow:
Even the chain is very very yellow:
It provides a refreshing contrast with my shoes, which are very very blue:
And if you ride it on those yellow bits of the sidewalk for blind people, it becomes completely camouflaged when viewed from above. Very useful if you are being chased by a helicopter:
This thing is the complete opposite of my old bike, which is all black and gray. On the down side my new very very yellow bike doesn't have a basket or fenders, so it can't completely replace the old one, which will still be doing shopping duties. This one weighs about half as much and I can go much much faster on it than can possibly be safe for me, so I'll just use it for high speed chases and that sort of thing.

The Death of Japan's Largest Ferris Wheel: The Rise and Fall of Sky Dream Fukuoka

A major event in Fukuoka history has been sadly, slowly and extremely quietly unfolding on the western fringes of the city. It is a sad little story that doesn't seem to have entered the English speaking part of the internet yet, so I thought I'd let this blog post fill in the gap. My homage to the short and tragic life of Sky Dream Fukuoka.

Sky Dream Fukuoka opened in 2001 to much fanfare. Well, at least I assume there was a lot of fanfare, I wasn't actually there. At 120 metres it was the largest Ferris wheel in all of Japan. That is saying something, as Japan is a country dotted with mammoth Ferris wheels, many of which at one point or another in their history could claim to be the largest in the world.

The gondolas were air conditioned and moved so slowly that it took 20 minutes to complete a single revolution. As a 2007 New York Times article noted:

"The 394-foot Sky Dream Fukuoka in Japan even advertises this lazy pace as a selling point — it helps ensure “maximum kissing time.”

It was built in an odd location, at the then recently opened Marinoa City Fukuoka, a shopping mall in the western suburbs of Fukuoka. I say "odd" because this location put it right next to the SkyWheel Ferris wheel, which at 58.3 metres was a fairly sizable one in its own right.

This created one of Fukuoka's more interesting sights, two massive Ferris wheels built right next to each other. This is what they looked like from the ferry to Nokonoshima:
They could be seen from miles away and, lit up at night, dominated the city's western skyline. As the Japanese Wikipedia entry notes, this unusual sight became one of the city's more prominent landmarks and they became known as Fukuoka's "twin Ferris wheels."

It goes without saying, of course, that while it makes for an interesting sight, putting two massive Ferris wheels right next to each other like this is perhaps not an economically sound idea. Nor is placing it way out in the suburbs at a mall with no rail access. Despite this, passenger numbers were enough for it to be operated in the black.

The end, however, came swiftly two years ago. The story in the news as I remember it is that the wheel needed some to have some very expensive maintenance work performed in order to keep it in operation. Its owners, the Evergreen Group, decided that the cost of these and a projected decline in passenger numbers would make the wheel economically un-viable and decided to permanently close it instead. On September 26, 2009 Sky Dream Fukuoka carried its last passengers, less than 8 years after it had carried its first.

One of the things I regret in life is that I passed up the chance to take a ride on this wheel. Ena and I made our first visit to Marinoa in August of 2009. We wanted to take a ride on the thing just to say we had ridden the biggest (we've been on other big wheels in Yokohama and Kobe before), but were a bit pressed for time that day (it was actually our anniversary) and decided that we would just do it the next time we visited. We had no idea that a month later the thing would be permanently shuttered.

This is a picture I took on that day:
This is a picture I took yesterday from roughly the same spot:
The thing sat silently for at least a year after its closure, but last summer work commenced on dismantling it and by now it looks close to half finished. It has been sold to a Taiwanese investor and, once they have re-constructed it there, that country will have a Ferris wheel larger than any in all of Japan (and the 9th largest in the world).
Its kind of a sad story. This thing was only 8 years old when it closed - that is barely more than half the life expectancy of a chihuahua. Its entire existence from birth to death fit neatly within the confines of the fledgling 21st century, which must be a first for a structure of this magnitude.
Workers were busy at work taking the thing down piece by piece as we visited. It is a massive operation, it looks just as difficult as it must have been to build it in the first place.

Nearby its smaller twin rotates in somber silence, mourning the loss of its big brother:Ena and I had ice cream under the little one (literally):
We had to wonder if this one's days aren't numbered also. In the 15 minutes we were there not a single customer appeared. One by one the lonely little gondolas arced skyward, empty. It was a Monday though and the mall wasn't too busy, perhaps on the weekend it'll get more business. We thought of going up, but it seemed like it would have been a sorry substitute for the big one we sorely wished we had ridden when we had the chance. And the 500 yen price for what looked like a 3 minute or so ride seemed a bit steep.

Anyway, that is the abbreviated story of Sky Dream Fukuoka. Its fall from grace is no better exemplified than this photo from Fukuoka's official tourist website which has completely airbrushed it out of existence:
Like Trotsky, it was never there. Just a figment of our imaginations.

Postscript July 8, 2011

Yesterday I turned on the 9 o'clock NHK national news and their lead story was about this very Ferris wheel. The remainder of it collapsed suddenly while the disassembly work was underway. 2 cranes went down with it, and together they flattened a number of cars and did some damage to the building.

Pictures of the damage and story (in Japanese) are available here.

Related Posts:

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

The New Hakata Station

If you haven't done so already I'd just like to remind everyone that there is plenty of time left to donate to the tsunami relief efforts. Loads of people out there need your help! Info on places to donate if you are in Japan or Canada I put in this previous post.

One of the side effects of the disaster - which it bears repeating is the worst natural disaster to ever strike an industrialized nation - in Kyushu has been the cancellation of a bunch of train-related PR events. The Shinkansen which opened between Tokyo and Osaka way back in 1964 finally made its way to this backwater a couple weeks ago. Well, actually its been in Fukuoka for a while, but they only just completed the Kyushu line, which connects all the way down to Kagoshima. The Kyushu Shinkansen made its massively anticipated first run on March 12, 2011 - a day that planners thought would be one just like any other but in actual fact turned out to be the day after the disaster. While the train ran on time, all the celebratory events that would have attracted massive crowds were, as one would expect, quietly canceled.

Some of these events revolved around Hakata station, Fukuoka's main station and one end of the new Shinkansen line. The station, whose entrance is pictured above, itself opened for the first time just days before the quake hit.

Since I arrived here two and a half years ago, Hakata station has been more or less a giant construction site that somehow managed to also serve as a train station. The new building is a massive structure that has been in the works for years. I have no idea what the old station looked like. The new one is 10 stories tall, most of which are devoted to the 229 stores that the massive shopping complex houses. Its construction has created a bit of controversy as its sheer size is seen as a threat to the merchants in Fukouka's other centre of consumer gravity, Tenjin, which looks to lose a lot of shoppers to the new behemoth.

The ribbon cutting ceremony of the station went ahead before the quake, but everything else has been canceled. Nonetheless, the station has become a massive attraction in its first couple of weeks. Ena and I decided to head over today to have a look at the thing as it has a ton of restaurants that we wanted to check out for lunch.

The entrance is quite impressive. I really do have to learn to take these "couple self-photos" in a manner that does not accentuate my double-chin though:
The place was an absolute zoo. Wall to wall people, from the 1st floor to the 10th (we went through them all). We got a seat at a Mexican restaurant on the 9th floor, which was quite nice. We had non-alcoholic margaritas with our lunches for just 100 yen extra:
After that we headed down into the cavernous interior of the beast:
They've got a lot of stores. A lot. Trust me. No shortage of stores here. Mostly clothes.

Some of them had neat stuff though. At the Tokyu Hands department store they have a fake lego model of the Fukuoka Dome with a baseball game going on which I though was really cool:
They even had little people playing the game and sitting in the stands. I want this, but it isn't for sale:
On the 8th floor I did a double take when getting off the elevators. They have a model railroad shop:
I love model railroads. My earliest childhood memory is from Christmas of 1979 when my dad and Grandpa surprised me with a big electric railroad that they had spent some time putting together. They are the best. Later in the 1980s when my Dad was transferred to Germany we put together a German railroad set together, which was a lot of fun. Looking around at the big train set they had in the store I recognized some of the buildings as being the same as our German set:
I convinced Ena to let me have a look. I love stores like this. With everything set up in glass cases looking really good:
You can see where this is going. Ena was really sweet and bought a train for me.

We couldn't afford any of the expensive new ones in the glass case, but this shop is great because it sells old used ones too for a lot cheaper. So we got one of those.

This is what it looks like. "N" scale. They come in their own box:
Open it up and hey, a train:
I also got some rails:
And we picked out some little people together:
We set them up on the coffee table and played with them for a bit. I have no way to make the train run (no transformer) and not enough track to actually make a loop, so our options were pretty limited:
The people didn't come with bases, so they were incapable of standing on their own. We just sort of piled them up here and there, which is all we could think of to do with them at this early stage in our sojourn into model railroading:
Very colorful. I like that.