Alas, Shizuoka...

Or, the other title I came up with, "If you're ever in Hamamatsu..." just get back on the train and return to wherever it is you came from.

The Hamamatsu of my youth, which is to say a couple of years ago, is an idyllic place, full of long walks on the beach, while enormous kites fight it out overhead. I had extrapolated somewhere in my noodle that if Hamamatsu can have such a kick ass festival then it must be an altogether groovy place. With this in mind, Colleen and I set out on her birthday to explore this mystic wonderland just across the border in Shizuoka.

The station, a combo train station/shopping mall as most are here, was abuzz with people scurrying about scooping up everything from designer handbags to pickled vegetables. It bode well for our journey; it seemed that Hams was really the kind of place our imaginations had whipped it up to be, full of life and fantastically weird shit.

But,

The moment you step outside the station you realize two things: 1) Hams is full of gigantic fuck off buildings and 2) these buildings are largely empty. Empty? Yes, hollow shells of day to day commerce. Aside from the post office and yet another shopping mall attached to yet another train station, Hams beyond the eki is largely devoid of what one would call urban life. It was rather creepy walking thru the immaculate desert that is Act City, a monument to cultural pointlessness, whose vast confines were uninhabited by the kinds of shops I suppose the city government wanted to attract. On paper, the place is quite nice: a concert hall, an exhibition hall, an art gallery, a musical instrument museum, a small park situated above the concert hall, an observatory atop the main tower from which on a good day one can see Mt. Fuji, and so forth. The one thing this place didn't have - something these reports never seem to take into account - is people. A pristine paradise ostensibly for no one.

So what is Hamamatsu full of (besides shit)? Foreigners. Shizuoka has the largest population of foreigners (by percentage) of any prefecture in the country, even including Osaka and Tokyo, due in large part to its massive shipping industry. Everywhere you go are signs in Portugeuse, Korean, Tagalog, and Chinese, though not, interestingly, in English. If Hamamatsu is anything, it's representative of what the foreign population truly is here: not white, not well-to-do, not English speaking. I suppose that's why the Japanese are nowhere to be found.