A meizanologist's diary (130)

23 March: As you know, the terms of the Japan Rail Pass do not explicitly disallow time travel. So I’m unfazed when the doors of the Hakutaka super express shush open at Ueda and disgorge me into a late Shōwa afternoon. Just on the way to the hotel I pass two or three shuttered camera shops – remember those – all advertising the wares of Kodak and Fujifilm. 

Film, in case anyone under fifty is reading this blog, was a rich smörgåsbord of chemicals smeared onto a celluloid substrate. Still is in fact: you really should try it some time…

We digress. I check in at the hotel, which has a bookshelf of manga on each of its elevator landings, along with a chair styled in the fashion of Charles Rennie Mackintosh. When I ask the reception about them, they tell me that the hotel’s owner is a fan of the great Scottish designer. Well, this too makes sense: according to Wikipedia, Mackintosh was strongly influenced by the simplicity of Japanese design…

Now I need food for tomorrow. The way to the supermarket leads past a movie palace that looks to be of even greater vintage than Shōwa. The Ueda Eigekijo’s website says it was built in Taishō 6 (1917), on the site of a Meiji-era theatre called the Suehiroza. It still has a coffered ceiling from those days, just like the one in the Imperial Theatre in Tokyo, before it burned down in the Great Kanto Earthquake.

Interior of the Ueda Eigekijo.
Image courtesy of the NPO Ueda Eigekijo.

In the Eigeki’s heyday, maids brought coffee to patrons in the gallery seats and five or six staff were on hand at all times, including ticket sellers, ticket takers, two projectionists, and cleaners. Alas, the opening of a modern multiplex nearby ended its days as a viable cinema in 2011. It’s now kept alive as a cultural centre by a non-profit organisation of concerned citizens. Quite similar, indeed, to the story of the NPO that runs the once and future Mt Fuji research station…

Ueda, by contrast, is cashing in nicely on its retro streetscapes. Film-makers converge on it when they are looking for that mid-Shōwa vibe. In 2013, "Seiten no Hekireki" (“A bolt from the blue”) was filmed here with the aim of recreating Asakusa in the 1960s. The plot follows a struggling stage magician who gets sent back in time, where he befriends his future parents before he's born. Better not try this with a Japan Rail Pass, though…

By the time I have scored myself some bread and cheese at the supermarket, dusk has fallen on old Ueda's machiya and taverns. Still illuminated by the last rays of the sunset, a pink lenticular hovers over the eastern mountains. 

Which reminds me: I’m here to climb a volcano tomorrow. Like the movie palace, Azumaya is somewhat of a retro piece, having last erupted a third of a million years ago. But there’s always the weather to worry about. And, of course, the bears...