Emptiness and a Train

I don't go up to Yamagata city all that often.  Every now and then I might go up there to fill in for a teacher.  Aside from that, I've been up there a few times to catch a bus to go to the Yamagata Prefecture Traffic Safety Office (back home we'd call it the Motor Vehicle Branch) and to attend a couple of concerts.  Oh yeah, I did drop in one time after visiting Mt. Zao too.

Yesterday was a sunny day and I wasn't in the mood to stay home all day.  So I decided to head up to Yamagata to check out a store I've been thinking of going to.  I did briefly consider driving but decided to take the train instead.  It was simply a case of saving gas.  As I made my way up there on the train I realized that I also had the liberty of taking my time without having to worry about finding or paying for parking.

Once there I did a quick tour of the department store at the station and then grabbed a bite to eat at a local Mos Burger restaurant.  After that I dropped in on the shop I had my eye one, made a mental shopping list and then wandered over to the Yamagata City Art Museum.  The museum is located quite close the inner moat of the Yamagata castle.  There's no much left of the castle other that its walls and moat.  The grounds of the castle are now home to a park and some athletic facilities.  The eastern entrance, close to the museum, is dominated by a reconstruction of its gate and guard house.  I indulged myself by taking a few photos of the structure and some passing trains (the Ou line tracks are laid outside the castle walls and moat).

The museum is a modern looking structure which functions as both an exhibit and meeting facility.  Not all of the galleries are in use.  The permanent collection seems to consist of French paintings (Impressionist, landscape and modern), bronze sculptures and some Japanese screens and scrolls.  The French paintings were an interesting bunch with representative works by Monet, Manet, Picasso, Renoir and their contemporaries.  As for the sculptures, I noticed that about half of them were made prior to World War II.  Which of course had me thinking about how the larger pieces managed to escape being melted down for the war effort.  I suppose they weren't large enough or of a usable metal composition.  Or perhaps just lucky.

The trip home was uneventful but not without a touch of the peculiar.  I had taken my iPod with me to help me pass the time.  I had picked The Tragically Hip's "Yer Favourites" to listen to.  It's a two CD set so there would be enough tunes to listen to for the duration of the trip back to Yonezawa.  At first the setting wasn't so odd.  It was dusk and I wasn't paying too much attention to what was passing outside.  But once it was dark then I noticed something different.  I was listening to songs which made me cast my mind to the vast emptiness of Canada.  Once we were passing through the mountain valleys and fields then the setting was complete.  One couldn't see much other than the banks of snow lining the side of the tracks.  I looked out and felt like I was on a train traversing a snow covered empty expanse of the Canadian prairies.  That was not withstanding the conductor's announcements in Japanese and decidedly Japanese looking stations.  The effect gave out once the train got past Nanyo.  There were more visible signs of civilization and human habitation then.  And so, alas, that little bit of magic evaporated...