SES: Takinoue-Tomisato

Outline

A small shrine and a train stop that's no longer there.

Story

The border bridge

Even with the functional administration and associated maintenance of roadside signs to reflect that gone for a while, the very adjacent municipality signs of Kuriyama, Yuubari and Yuni are persisting, to an extent. At least, I can still tell one from another and get the unrealistic feeling of crossing borders.

I don' think I have experienced a lot of meaningful border crossing. The very ceremonial type. Or should I say, the ceremonially artificial type? Like when I first came here there was immigration, customs, and all that. I do think that border crossing is quite ceremonial in itself, though. The artificial borders created by someone drawing a dotted or dashed or solid line on a map, and the not-so-artificial borders naturally imposing themselves wherever they are because there is a river, a ridge, a pet, a nay, a put, a nupri, or something else happens to there.

In this semi-post-modernity world that I currently live in, moving by road remains part of the common sense and people still prefer roads over not-roads, even if the roads deteriorated more or less since they were last restored to a suboptimal condition. The result of that persisting common sense that is relevant to all the talk about borders, is that 'river' archetype is the most usually encounterable border.

Still, it's not exactly like the legendary border marker somewhere down south, where due to the original river being redirected elsewhere and the borders remaining as-is, the physical legislative symbol can be easily accessed by land and literally within touch. The borders here are less rare than that one. Partly due to no rivers were radically moved, by human or nature's will.

The Kawabata bridge still holds - here's the