After leaving Hattoji, I went down to the base town for Hattoji, which is called Yoshinaga (it's also Yoshinaga ward). As you can see at left, Yoshinaga is a mountain valley town, with the river and the railroad running right down the valley. The best item in Yoshinaga (apart from the richly anticipated grocery store) was the sign at right. This sign, posted near the railroad corssing, is a pictorial representation of the safety warning, "Don't raise the bed of your dump truck and then back up into the overhead electric train wires." Now you talk about a visual society!!!!
I took the train from Yoshinaga toward Ushimado, my next stop. Okayama prefecture in general and this town in particular are famous as the birthplace of the legend of Momotaro, a.k.a. "Peach Boy". Well, at left is a statue of Peach Boy, on his way to defeat the demon, but someone has given Peach Boy a valuable new pair of demon-fighting sunglasses to aid him in his quest. Pretty cool.
Now, I didn't go to biwa-ko (the huge lake next to Kyoto) on this trip, but since I'm from Flint, Michigan, I might have to go there after seeing this promotional flyer. This is a flyer for a showboat that cruises Lake Biwa during the summer. It looks like they have a lot of dining rooms, and live bands. They're trying to recreate that showboat experience! I couldn't tell if they had casinos aboard or not. But of course, the really funny thing is that there were never any showboats in the state of Michigan -- Michigan doesn't access the Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, or other rivers (it does have the Great Lakes, but that's not where the showboats were). The funniest part of this flyer is that at the bottom it says, "Go! Go! Michigan." Of course, that lame slogan was the official state tourism promotional slogan back in the 80s... Obviously somebody wrote to the Michigan State Tourism Board before naming their boat!