Find my Japan

The second article of this series focus on “Railway crossing” and “Shaved ice” (Kakigori “かき氷”), both of which imply Japanese local summer festivals.

This article starts with a scene in which a girl is waiting for someone at a crossing.

Railroads crossings are seen as one of the symbols of Japanese country region, because most of the country towns have crossings but metropolitan cities have little.

In addition they are also symbol of school age of Japanese people since little number of people except for high school students use trains in rural areas in Japan where adults move around by car.

Then the following picture makes Japanese people imagine that she (who seems to be a high school student) is on the way to the local summer festival, waiting for someone near the station.

Shrines usually don't allow people to sell things in its site except for special days including summer festivals.

Therefore, you can see many roadway shops open along the approach of shrines.

Most of the stuffs you can by at the roadway shops in summer festivals are foods, Okonomiyaki, Takoyaki and Shaved ice (Kakigori).

Shaved ice is a simple ice dessert with various kind of syrups enjoyed by Japanese people in summer.

The history of the food backs to Heian era in 11th century. According to “Makurano-soshi (枕草子)” written by “Seisho-nagon (清少納言)”, telling about Japanese emotional life style at the time, Japanese aristocracy enjoyed shaved ice in order to mitigate the bad feeling of the humid summer in Kyoto.

Firstly, only rich people was able to enjoy the shaved ice because it was difficult to get ice in hot summer at the time before refrigerators were invented.
Thanks to technical revolution in Meiji-era in 19th century, it became easier to get ice blocks so cheaply that most Japanese got to be able to afford it.

Since then, it became indispensable for Japanese summer.

In this article, we said that metropolitan cities don't have many crossings.

However, there's only one crossing called “2nd Nakazato crossing (第二中里踏切)” between Tabata station and Komagome station Yamanote line(*).
You can get to the crossing from the University of Tokyo by walk.
Please visit the place with out university and find your Japan!


(*)Yamanote line is one of Tokyo's busiest and most important lines, connecting most of Tokyo's major stations and urban centers, including Marunouchi, the Yūrakuchō/Ginza area, Shinagawa, Shibuya, Shinjuku, Ikebukuro and Ueno, with all but two of its 29 stations connecting to other railway or underground (subway) lines (quoting from wikipedia “Yamanote line” )

Next article

Next article will be the last article of this series introducing Japanese country roads and off shots of this series.