KAMEDAKE STATION (SHIMANE)

Like some noodles with your ticket?

Photos by Yomiuri Shimbun Photographer Satoshi Yokoyama

By Katsuo Kokaji

Yomiuri Shimbun Staff Writer

The journey along the banks of Lake Shinji and up into the surrounding mountains is left to a single-carriage train. Gazing out of the window, I saw a perfect winter landscape of pure white snow.

There were only a few passengers on the train, which made me feel kind of lonely, but that feeling changed when the train arrived at Kamedake, a station quite different from any other.

The station building has a sign on its tin roof saying, "teuchi soba" (homemade noodles). If the station resembles a noodle shop, it is because that is what it doubles as. Kamedake's stationmaster also makes and serves soba noodles.

The shop, named Ogiya, was opened in 1973, by the then stationmaster, Ryukichi Yuzuriha. He had been entrusted by Japanese National Railways, now West Japan Railway Co., to manage the station building in 1971, and opened the noodle shop two years later as a side business.

Yuzuriha, 75, retired last year, and his 43-year-old son, Tetsuya, took over as stationmaster and noodle shop owner.

Tetsuya starts his day making soba noodles. He adds water taken from a nearby well to buckwheat flour ground at a stone mill, then kneads and pulls the dough. His wife, Satsuki, 41, helps him both serve the noodles and sell train tickets.

But there is another reason this station is unique. "Almost everyone who comes here has seen 'Suna no Utsuwa' (The Vessel of Sand)," said Tetsuya, pointing to a picture of Seicho Matsumoto, the writer of the novel upon which the film was based.

Released in 1974, "Suna no Utsuwa" portrays the nomadic life of a leper and his young son, and the death of a man the boy once knew. Kamedake Station is where the father and son's life spent traveling together ends.

When the father leaves Kamedake on a train to enter a nursing home, his son, who instinctively knows that he will be separated from his father forever, runs after him across the platform. The actual shooting of the scene took place at Izumo-Yashiro Station, two stops away from Kamedake Station.

The story was reproduced as a TV drama in 2004, with a popular member of the SMAP pop group, Masahiro Nakai, cast in the lead role. The drama has attracted many young people to Kamedake Station, some of whom have returned for another bowl of the tasty noodles.

Delicious soba noodles, born from the earth of Kamedake, have made the station a unique meeting place for people.