This is the continuation of my walk along the Kominato Railway line.
If you take the train two stops down from Itabu, you will arrive at Kazusa-Ookubo Station, which is surrounded by forest.
A competition between cherry blossoms and rapeseed flowers around a quiet mountain station.
There were other spring flowers too.
Camellias (I think) were in full bloom, so I used the white cloudy sky as a blindfold and took a photo of the train coming into the station.
If you take the next train down the line and go one station further, you will arrive at Yoro-Keikoku Station. This is the final destination of our day trip photography trip.
If you walk from this station for about 15 minutes, you should be able to see the famous “Ishigami rapeseed field” spreading out by the railway line, and you should be able to take a photo of the culmination of the rapeseed flowers in full bloom that you have seen at each station so far, combined with the Kominato Railway.
However, when I got off at Yoro-Keikoku Station, I found a surprising handwritten notice.
“The field of rapeseed flowers at Ishigami is not in bloom this year.”
Really?
There must be many people who visit here with the aim of seeing the flowers, but there was no warning or notice at all, and this shocking information was only revealed when we arrived here.
It may not be anyone’s fault that the flowers haven’t bloomed, but I can’t help but feel that the local tourism industry and Kominato Railway are at fault for not telling us that they hadn’t bloomed.
Blaming others won’t make the flowers bloom. Anyway, I went to check how many flowers had not bloomed and walked around.
They really hadn’t bloomed.
In the tourist photos in normal year, this area is filled with yellow flowers, but there were no rapeseed flowers at all.
I did a bit of research online to try to find out why this was happening, but there were scattered reports of vermin damage and disease, so it wasn’t clear. This may be a much more serious situation for people involved in tourism than it is for me to complain about.
Before turning back, I took a look at the daffodils that were just starting to bloom and took two shots. I failed spectacularly with both of them, but I’m going to post them anyway, despite my embarrassment.
Failure No. 1: I took a close-up photo of the daffodils using a telephoto lens, and tried to blur the image of the passing train in the background. As a result of trying to find a shutter speed that wouldn’t blur the train, the aperture was opened too much, and before I had time to worry about the subject being blurred, it was too out of focus to make out, and I ended up with a big failure.
There were cherry blossoms and some kind of blue flower behind the train, and if I’d managed to get them all in the shot, it would have made a colorful picture with the red train. Oh well.
Failure number 2. This was the first time I’d been able to take photos of the train from anywhere along the track, so I failed to estimate how big the train would be in the frame, and ended up with a huge amount of empty space to the right and above, making it a total disaster. If it had been a sunny day with a beautiful sunset, it might have turned out okay, but the boring white sky…
Normally, the area next to the tracks would be covered in rapeseed flowers, but now there was nothing there. I didn’t know how close I was allowed to get, so I kneeled down and set up my camera, making sure not to go beyond the line of car tracks that were still visible alongside rail the tracks, but I wonder if that was the right thing to do?
Anyway, this was the end of my first Kominato Railway photography walk. It was a bit of a waste that I didn’t get a single glimpse of the scenic spot of Yoro Valley, but well, it was a day trip with time constraints, so there was nothing I could do about it this time.
I didn’t get caught in the rain or encounter any other problems like train delays, and the reasonable rice balls I bought from the lady in Goi were delicious, so I thought it was a fun day trip, even if the photos were a bit iffy.
